


























MOSCOW 


OREL • 


Kursk 


KHARKOV, 

















GOLDEN DAYS of SOVIET RUSSIA 











To My Wife, 


Mary 



The Cathedral of St. Basil, formerly the holiest chuch of 
Moscow, is at present a museum 









GOLDEN DAYS 

of 

SOVIET RUSSIA 


By 

Adolf Carl Noe / 

Illustrations by 

Edmund Giesbert / 


THOMAS S. ROCKWELL COMPANY 

CHICAGO 

1931 


Copy Z. 
















COPYRIGHT, 1931, BY 
THOMAS S. ROCKWELL COMPANY 
CHICAGO 




Printed in United States of America 




MAY 22 1931 s ' 

©CU 38367 J 


CONTENTS 



Introduction 

xiii 

I 

En Route to Moscow 

15 

II 

Sight-seeing in the Soviet Capital 

23 

III 

From Moscow to Kharkov 

32 

IV 

In the Mining Region 

40 

V 

Experiences in Kharkov 

63 

VI 

Echoes of the War and Revolution 

86 

VII 

Social Customs and City Life 

93 

VIII 

Industrial Development and Foreign 



Relations 

109 

IX 

Religion and Morality 

122 

X 

Observations of Country Life 

127 

XI 

Soviet Philosophy and Politics 

136 

XII 

Types of Character and Race 

147 

XIII 

Science, Education, and Culture 

162 

XIV 

Good-by to Sovietland 

172 







































































J 



















































































































* 



N * 
















































* 




































































' 








LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 


THE CATHEDRAL of St. Basil, formerly the holiest 
church of Moscow, is at present a museum frontispiece 

WE SAW WOMEN in gayly-colored skirts and with 
bright kerchiefs on their heads working in the fields 19 

IVAN SUFFOVITCH sang and danced for us, and 
then kissed every one of us on both cheeks 47 

“LOOK OUT, MAN, I am from Chicago” and reached 
for my hip pocket—Nikolay made one leap for the door 81 

I WAS TAGGED by a pretty girl—the ribbon read: 

“For the Break-with-En gland-Airplane-Squadron” 117 

SHE ASSURED ME it was the best melon of the lot 
because a mouse had eaten a hole in it 


155 














































































































































* 






















GOLDEN DAYS of SOVIET RUSSIA 









. 














' 










I •: • " ' ' 










INTRODUCTION 



'HIS book describes a trip to Russia, now officially known 


JL as the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics (U. S. S. R.), 
by a member of a Commission formed in America through the 
agency of the Donetz Basin Coal Corporation in 1927. It 
was the business of this Commission to examine old coal mines 
and to plan new ones. In Russia, the Donetz Basin Coal 
Corporation is called “Donugol.” It belongs, like all Russian 
corporations, to the Soviet Government. The Donetz Basin 
is usually referred to as “Donbass”; it is located in the Ukraine, 
an autonomous republic of the Soviet Union, in southwestern 
Russia. The name Russia, it may be noted here, is no longer 
officially in use, except as applied to one of the members of 
the Soviet Union—the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Re¬ 
public (R. S. F. S. R.). The writer acted as mining geologist 
for the Commission. Names of persons in the book, except 
those of public men, are slightly altered, or, if the owner is 
still living, the family name is sometimes omitted. The stand¬ 
ard monetary unit in Russia is the ruble . One ruble and 
ninety-four kopecks are equivalent to a dollar. Outside of 
Russia, the ruble is worth less. 


XUl 


The narrative is based on notes jotted down under the 
impressions of the moment. The period of time covered by 
the book was one of high hopes and enthusiastic planning, 
when faith in the speedy realization of the ideas set forth by 
the Soviet leaders was at its height. A spirit of undampened 
optimism filled the air. It was, in short, the Golden Age of 
Soviet Russia. Since then, serious obstacles have been encoun¬ 
tered, which had not been anticipated, and which have brought 
everyone face to face with grim realities. In contrast with the 
earlier period, the present era (1931) may be considered the 
Iron Age. If, however, the Soviet regime succeeds in at least 
partially surmounting the difficulties of the present, there may 
ensue a Silver Age, in which the visions of Russia’s future will 
have been greatly modified, but in which that great country 
will enjoy a certain measure of stability and prosperity. 


XIV 



Chapter I 

EN ROUTE TO MOSCOW 
AY 28, 1927, saw us on our way from Germany to 



JLVJL Sovietland. We left Berlin at 1:40 P. M. on the 
International Paris-to-Warsaw train. It had been impossible 
to secure sleeping reservations on short notice. Our train was 
filled with a French Military Commission bound for Poland. 
In Berlin, the French officers wore civilian clothing, but, after 
passing the Polish frontier, they soon blossomed out in horizon- 
blue uniforms. 

Eight hours later we reached the Polish border. We entered 
Poland shortly before ten o’clock, having before us a twenty- 
four-hour journey through Poland and fifteen hours more 
from the Polish border to Moscow. To this, there had to be 
added an hour for the change from Central European to 
IS 



GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


Eastern European time, so that the Berlin-Moscow trip con¬ 
sumed approximately forty-eight hours. 

We had to sit up all night or, rather, stretch ourselves on 
the seats of our first-class compartment. There being six in 
our party, it was none too comfortable. Besides, it was 
necessary to get up for customs inspection. The Polish customs 
inspection was comparatively easy; the officials were polite and 
all spoke German. Also, the Polish conductor, who took care 
of the train after the frontier was passed, spoke perfect German. 

The next day, Sunday, passed quietly in the train. We 
did not stop in Poland, but watched life from the car window. 
The country is flat; some of it is pasture, some is cultivated. 
There were plenty of woods and occasionally we could see, 
from the train, ditches forming zig-zags with barbed wire in 
front of them. These were old trenches; some from the Great 
War, some from the Polish-Russian War. 

Many officers and soldiers could be seen at the railroad 
stations. In the country, we saw some cavalry barracks with 
horses being led around in the adjoining riding-squares. The 
uniforms of the Polish Army, with their four-cornered forage 
caps and the many-colored trimmings on the khaki coats looked 
smart, and there was an ample display of medals on the chests 
of many of the officers and petty officers. A large number of 
decorations must have been issued to faithful servants by the 
grateful Polish republic in the eight years since its establishment. 
We had to change from German to Polish money, and I 
noticed that the conductor of the dining car, whenever he was 
16 


EN ROUTE TO MOSCOW 


given a Polish bill, held it against the light to see whether it 
was genuine. Sometimes he refused it. 

In the evening we were rolling toward the Russian frontier 
which we reached at ten. At the last Polish station, Stolbtzi, 
where the train stopped for some time, Polish gendarmes, 
accompanied by soldiers, visited the train and inspected our 
•passports. Then the train slowly started through a so-called 
no-man’s land toward Niegoreloye, the first station in Soviet 
Russia. 

We were all intensely curious to see how Soviet Russia would 
look. Even in Berlin, no one seemed well informed about it. 
I, in particular, felt a little uneasy because of a silk skirt in 
my steamer trunk. The Russian representative of a German 
steel concern had asked me in Berlin if I would do him a favor. 
He was entitled to one, because he had rendered us a good 
many; so I cheerfully agreed. He handed me a little package 
containing a silk skirt which was to be delivered to the father 
of a young girl in Kharkov. Her father had not dared to 
take it into Russia, because he was a Russian and he was afraid 
that importation of silk cloth would either bring him a heavy 
fine or arrest. But my Russian friend in Berlin thought that 
American citizens would not be bothered with much custom¬ 
house inspection and that we could bring in almost anything 
we wanted to. I had opened the package and laid the skirt 
among my underwear, hoping it would attract no attention; 
in fact, it was entirely overlooked when my baggage was 
examined in the Russian frontier station. 


17 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


One of our fellow travelers, who had passed the Russian 
frontier a good many times, pointed out to me some men in 
long coats and green caps, who stood on the platform of the 
station when the train rolled into Niegoreloye. They were 
the soldiers of the G. P. U.*, the Russian political police, 
successors to the famous Cheka. When the train stopped, 
they looked under the cars to see whether anybody was trying 
to enter Russia illegally by clinging to the brakes. One of 
the long-coated, green-capped men entered the train and asked 
in Russian for our passports, this being also the name for the 
particular object in Russian. We handed them to him and 
he took them into the customhouse office of the station 
building, where we followed him later with our hand luggage, 
while our trunks were carried there by Russian porters. 

Entering the customhouse office we realized that we were 
really in Russia. The officials looked very much like the 
porters, and the rooms were neither very tidy nor elegant. 
There was a proletarian atmosphere, but the men were polite, 
did not bother us very much, and slowly we got through all 
the necessary routine of a customhouse inspection. This was 
not intended to be very rigid in our case, because we were 
employees of the Soviet Government hired to render them expert 
advice on coal mining. There were some small fees to be paid 
and our heavy baggage was forwarded in bond to Kharkov, 
our final place of destination. Of the customhouse officials, 

*G. P. U. are the initial letters of Gosudarstnoye Politicheskoye Upravly - 
enye, meaning Government Political Bureau. 

18 




We saw women in gayly-colored s\irts and with bright ker¬ 
chiefs on their heads wording in the fields 


19 







EN ROUTE TO MOSCOW 


a few spoke German, as well as Russian, and there was an 
official interpreter, who could talk English, but who did not 
help us very much. 

I was among the last to buy the sleeping car accommodations 
on the Russian train, to which we were transferred, but the 
train would not have been allowed to start until the last 
passenger had come through the customhouse rigmarole and 
purchased his tickets. 

It was twelve o’clock when we entered the Russian train. 
We were glad to be through all the ceremonies of entering a 
foreign country and ready to go to sleep. 

The Russian railroads have a wider gauge than those of 
Central Europe and no through trains can run across the 
border. This difference in gauge dates back to the time of 
the Tsars. It was intended to make a hostile invasion of 
Russia more difficult. The train from Niegoreloye to Moscow 
belongs to a schedule of express trains connecting Paris with 
Moscow. It is second only to the train running from Moscow 
to Vladivostok, which is the best one in Russia. 

The train started soon after midnight. 

In the morning our eyes greeted the Russian landscape for 
the first time. The train rolled through stations which bore 
inscriptions in Russian letters. In the country, we saw women 
in gayly-colored skirts and with bright kerchiefs on their heads 
working in the fields. On the roads were Russian farm wagons, 
called troikas, with high yokes and bearded drivers, who drove 
the three horses of the troika leisurely on their way. 

21 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


There was a dining car on the train. There we found the 
food excellent and waiters who spoke both German and French. 
We had to handle Russian money, of which we had taken 
a sufficient supply along from Berlin. 

On our first morning in Russia, I took a picture of a woman 
section-hand. As I had no permit yet for taking pictures, I 
took it from behind a curtain and through the glass pane of 
the window from the railroad car. There were a number of 
women working on the track, and their male boss lay in the 
shadow of a car, giving directions from a comfortable place. 


22 



Chapter II 


SIGHT-SEEING IN THE SOVIET CAPITAL 
E ARRIVED in Moscow, at three o’clock in the 



VV afternoon, at the White Russian-Baltic Station, which 
was formerly called the Alexander Station. As soon as the 
train stopped, the conductor informed me a man wanted to 
see us. He was a little, gray-haired man with a pointed beard 
and had the words “Savoy Hotel” on his sleeve band. He 
had been professor of modern languages in former days. I 
had made reservations by telegraph from Berlin to this hotel, 
indicating the train on which we would come, and the hotel 
had sent its interpreter to meet us. He engaged porters for 
our baggage and we walked out on the Tverskaya Sastava 
Place, where our interpreter hired two automobiles for us and 
baggage, bargaining for the fare for nearly an hour. 


23 


our 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


Meanwhile, a great number of loafers gathered around us, 
pushing too near for comfort, but being animated by pure 
curiosity to see the Americanskys. Later, I became accustomed 
to the same type of shabby-looking, not-too-clean loafers and 
to be unafraid of them, but I always watched my pockets in 
their presence. They are friendly, but contain a high per¬ 
centage of pickpockets. 

Our two automobiles drove at full speed over terrible 
pavement, cutting all corners very short, toward the hotel, 
and I thought the cars never would arrive there in toto. I 
learned later that reckless driving is comparatively safe, if 
there are few other cars on the road, and that Russian cars 
can stand an enormous amount of punishment in spite of their 
frequently very dilapidated appearance. They were the noisiest 
cars in my experience. In Russia, I saw also excellent auto¬ 
mobiles—high priced German Mercedes cars, Buicks, Rolls 
Royces, Austrian cars from the former ammunition factory 
in Steyer, and a lot of others. These were all intended for 
the use of high officials of the Soviet Government or prominent 
administrators of the Government Trusts. 

A mechanic always sits with the chauffeur in a Russian 
government car. Behind them can be seen the comrade 
commissar, or whatever he is. He usually wears the attire of 
a common workingman, is not smoothly shaven, and looks 
very proletarian. A proletarian appearance is often affected 
for political purposes. It seems strange to see such rather 
common looking persons ride in unusually fine cars, behind 
24 


SIGHT-SEEING IN THE SOVIET CAPITAL 


two servants who, in turn, also have to look proletarian. I 
suspect that some of the chauffeurs had owned fine cars them¬ 
selves in prerevolutionary times. Some talked French to me, 
which always is a sign of past high social standing. The 
genuine proletarian speaks no French, although many of them 
talk German and a few also English. 

In the Hotel Savoy we found excellent accommodations. 
Our party of six had three bedrooms with twin beds and three 
bathrooms. The furniture was superb, but incongruous; some 
beautiful antiques, some excellent pictures, but apparently 
collected from a variety of former aristocratic homes. 

Our first walk from the hotel led to the office of the director 
of one of the Russian corporations with which we were doing 
business. Our interpreter from the hotel accompanied us, but 
soon I noticed that he and the commissar, with whom we were 
dealing, apparently did not get along any too well and I broke 
into the conversation in German, which cleared the situation. 
The commissar spoke excellent German. Later I found, 
throughout my entire Russian experience, that the elimination 
of an interpreter always promoted good understanding. 
Interpreters usually have to condense the conversation of both 
parties and if they do not fully understand the business of the 
negotiations, they are apt to misinterpret rather than interpret. 
Sometimes there is also a lack of honesty on the part of the 
interpreter, who wishes to please one or the other party and 
tries to accentuate or to soften certain viewpoints, often very 
much against the interest or desire of those he serves. 

25 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


Of this conversation, I remember in particular an episode 
in which the commissar pointed to a map of the world and 
said, “Here is America, a great country, and here is the Soviet 
Union, the only other great country in the world, and it is 
necessary for us in Russia to adopt American methods of mass 
production and mass consumption. The methods of the smaller 
countries do not fill our purpose.” But he also added, “Here 
sits the spider, England, who tries to poison our friendly 
relations.” 

After having visited another office and having tried to make 
some arrangements for an early start to Kharkov, which was 
to be the headquarters of our activity, we were free for the 
remainder of the day. 

After the day’s business was done, we strolled through the 
town toward the Kremlin, which was formerly the holiest 
part of Moscow, but at present the seat of the Government of 
the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics (U. S. S. R.). Its 
gates are closed to strangers; so we could only stay on the 
Red Square and look at the medieval fortress with the many 
towers and churches behind the high red brick wall, which 
had defended the citadel of Moscow against Tartars and 
Poles. On the tops of these towers still hovered the gilded 
double eagles of the Tsars. 

The Red Square is an oblong place, stretching northwest- 
southeast. We reached it through the Ilyinka between the two 
Arcades and looked upon Lenin’s Tomb, just outside the 
Kremlin. It was a temporary wooden structure painted red. 

26 


SIGHT-SEEING IN THE SOVIET CAPITAL 


An endless line of people was passing through it. We joined 
the procession. Two soldiers in long coats guarded its entrance 
with fixed bayonets. We descended a staircase and suddenly 
faced Lenin himself slumbering under a glass cover. He looked 
like a sleeping man, with a bald head and a short red beard. 
A red blanket covered his feet, and he wore the coat of a 
working-man. Two soldiers stood guard over him and watched 
us with piercing looks. On the west side of the vault hung 
the banner of the Communist International, as well as the war 
banner of the Paris Commune of 1871. 

After leaving the Tomb of Lenin, we noticed a long row 
of graves along the wall of the Kremlin behind the mausoleum. 
On one of the tombstones, we read the name of John Reed, 
an American communist, who died in 1920 in Moscow. 

Walking to the northern end of the Red Place, we noticed 
a very small church, the smallest I ever saw. It could hold 
only a few people at a time, and a priest was chanting in it 
before a statute of the Holy Virgin. The Russians called it 
the Iberian Virgin* It stands between two buildings with a 
passage on both sides. The building north of the Chapel is 
the Second House of the Moscow Soviet. An inscription on 
it quotes the passage from Marx, “Religion is opium for the 
people.” 

We then walked along the two great buildings on the 
northeast side of the Square. They are called the Arcades 

•The Chapel of the Iberian Virgin is reported recently to have been 
destroyed by order of the Government. 

27 



GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


and contain a bazaar with a thousand shops. In front of the 
Arcades is the monument of Minin and Poysharsky. Minin 
was a butcher of Nishny Novgorod and Poysharsky a prince. 
The butcher had organized the troops which the Prince led 
against the Poles, whom he drove out of Moscow, sometime 
in the seventeenth century. Further south, close to the Arcades 
is a round elevated platform of stone called the place of skulls— 
Labnoye Mesto. Here the executions took place which Tsar 
Ivan the Terrible enjoyed seeing from a tower of the Kremlin. 
Afterwards, Tsar Ivan used to chant mass in one of his many 
churches, being the high priest of the Orthodox Greek Church. 

Another souvenir of Ivan the Terrible is the strange-looking 
church at the southeast end of the Red Square. There stands 
the Cathedral of St. Basil. It is a cluster of many towers, 
each crowned with a dome in the form and color of a fruit 
or vegetable. We see a pineapple, a melon, a red beet, a 
turnip, and so on. Now it is a museum. Ivan the Terrible 
asked the architect whether he could duplicate this building; 
and the man, hoping for another job, said, “Yes.” “But I 
want it to be unique,” answered the Tsar, “and, therefore, I 
shall have your eyes put out.” 

We returned to the hotel for supper, which was excellent 
and expensive, and afterwards walked around in the city. 
Sometimes beggars molested us and many poor people who 
might have seen better days asked us for alms, which were 
hard to refuse. A pretty girl in rags implored in Russian for 
money and received a silver coin. Thereupon, she stole a 
28 


SIGHT-SEEING IN THE SOVIET CAPITAL 


flower from a florist’s stand and put it in my coat lapel. 
Numerous beggar children roamed about in indescribably 
dirty rags. 

The next day, we went to the Governmental offices again 
to find out how soon we could have travel facilities to Kharkov, 
where our headquarters were to be during our stay in Soviet 
Russia. We learned that sleeping accommodations had been 
engaged for us on the 11:40 P. M. train. We had had an 
entire day to spend sight-seeing in Moscow and could easily 
have spent a month for this purpose without running out of 
observation material. 

Our guide rented four droshkes or horse cabs for our party. 
To engage a cab requires the following procedure: You tell 
the cabman where you want to go and offer him a price; for 
instance, one ruble (51 cents). He shakes his bearded head 
and asks for two rubles. You say “Nitchero” which means 
“nothing doing,” and walk on. He follows you with his cab 
and reduces his price to one ruble, seventy-five kopecks. Again 
“ Nitchero” and further walking. After a block or so, he 
catches up with you and offers the ride for one ruble, fifty, 
and again “Nitchero” The next offer will be one ruble, 
twenty-five, and you say “Kh or os ho” (very well) and take it. 

After due bartering, we drove off* and took in many places 
of interest. We visited in the Vavarska Street, the seventeenth- 

*A Chicago newspaper reported that we had been seen riding through 
Moscow in limousines wearing cowboy hats. A clipping of this report I 
received three weeks later in Kharkov. I may say for the correspondent of 
the paper that there was little of special interest going on in Russia at that 
time and that he was short of news. 


29 



GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


century house of the Boyar Romanoff, said to have been the 
founder of the Romanoff family. It is now a museum, and we 
each paid an eighty-four kopecks admission fee. We found it 
an interesting and odd building with beautiful old Russian 
decorations and porcelain stoves, pictures, and furniture. It 
stands near the Moskva and, driving over a bridge, we saw 
two fenced public bathing places, one for men and one for 
women. Anybody could take off his or her clothes and go 
into the water stark naked. The air felt chilly, but numerous 
people were in the water. 

Another place of interest was the Cathedral of Christ the 
Redeemer, situated on a hill along the Moskva, whence a 
wonderful view over the Kremlin and parts of Moscow could 
be had. The church was built as a memorial of Napoleon’s 
defeat. The cupola is gilded. In the interior, on the walls of 
the corridor, is pictured the history of the War of 1812. The 
Tsars used to pray in this church. It is well kept and still 
devoted to religious acts. 

While riding through one of the main streets of Moscow, 
I noticed a crowd of several hundred people waiting before 
a large building. I inquired about their business and learned 
that they were applicants for jobs in the great film studio where 
Sergei Eisenstein produces such wonderful films as “Potemkin” 
(pronounced Patyo’mkin) and his educational movies through 
which the adult masses in Russia receive much of their instruc¬ 
tion about handling modem implements. Eisenstein uses no 
professional movie actors, but selects his character types from 
30 


SIGHT-SEEING IN THE SOVIET CAPITAL 


the masses, with infinite patience. I had seen Potemkin in 
America and had greatly admired its mass movements and 
highly original light effects. 

We were told that the trains to Kharkov had no dining 
cars attached. In fact there were none in Russia except on the 
Paris-Moscow and the Moscow-Vladivostok trains. So we had 
to provide ourselves with food, which we purchased in the big¬ 
gest cooperative store in Moscow. I never saw a more extensive 
grocery store in my life. For the sum of forty-five rubles, 
we got Siberian grouse, to be carried along as cold meat, caviar, 
bread, cheese, cakes, exquisite pastry, cigarettes, mineral water, 
wine, and cognac to last six people for a night and day. 


31 



Chapter III 

FROM MOSCOW TO KHARKOV 


A T MIDNIGHT we were on the train, with sleeping 
X jL quarters in three compartments, one each for two of us. 
The bed linen had to be rented from the conductor for three 
rubles a night per person. It did not look clean, and we 
suspected bedbugs. I never rented bed clothing again in 
Russia after that night’s experience. 

Every railroad car in Russia has a conductor, and, after he 
has checked up the tickets, which include place assignments, 
his main occupation is to bring hot water to the travelers, who 
make tea on the train. Nobody who has any sense at all 
drinks unboiled water in Russia. Therefore, the perpetual 
tea-drinking. The compartments are lighted with candles at 
night, and the same candles must also illuminate the corridor. 


32 


FROM MOSCOW TO KHARKOV 


The passengers lock the doors and windows, lest pickpockets 
might invade the compartments. If you leave your compart¬ 
ment at a railroad station, you have the conductor lock your 
door or you will miss something or everything upon your return. 
I slept in my trousers, rolling my shoes in my coat, which I 
placed under my head, and covered myself with an overcoat. 
This precaution guaranteed the safety of my most necessary 
belongings. My money, I carried in a belt and in my trouser 
pockets, also my watch and, especially, my passport. Thievish¬ 
ness seemed to be quite prevalent in Russia, and we were 
sufficiently warned. 

I thought that it would take me some time to feel confident 
that I could travel all over Russia without an interpreter. 
Everything was so different there. Even to buy a ticket involved 
a procedure that had to be learned. 

A railway station is filled with a surging mass of humanity. 
Peasants squat with their families on the floor, or sleep on 
benches, tables, stairs. They seem to come to the station and 
live there until they get a ticket and catch a train—which 
may happen today, tomorrow, or next week. The ticket office 
opens one hour before train time, and two or three hundred 
people may be lined up, carefully kept in order by a policeman. 
The first fifty may get tickets; the others wait for another train. 
Or the ticket office runs short of tickets and none can be sold 
until a new supply has arrived, although the train may be only 
half full. 

The experienced traveler hires a nosilshchik (porter), gives 
33 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


him money to buy a ticket, and remembers the number of the 
porter. The latter is absolutely dependable and turns up in 
time for the train. He hands you the ticket and whatever 
change is due you, takes your handbags to the car, and receives 
a good tip. He has obtained the ticket through the back door 
of the ticket office. In a similar way, you attend to your 
baggage. In large towns like Leningrad, Moscow, or Kharkov, 
you can buy tickets and check baggage through the Derutra, 
a German-Russian travel bureau. Also the hotel or any 
government office with which we did business would secure 
tickets for us. It would have been out of the question for us 
to do it ourselves except at small stations. 

The Russian railroad cars are divided into compartments, 
and the so-called soft cars are very comfortable. You can 
stretch out on the upholstered benches, but, if you do it, you 
must take your shoes off, or you pay three rubles strafe (fine). 
The so-called hard cars are all right for a short trip, but are 
not to be recommended for long distances, partly on account 
of the motley crowd which uses them and also because they 
are very uncomfortable. They are more like box-cars with 
three decks of shelves. 

It is always advisable to take food and bottled spring water 
along. The trains stop at stations with restaurants, but service 
is slow, and anybody who is not familiar with Russian travel 
and the Russian language may miss his train while eating at 
the station. This may be avoided by paying close attention 
to signals. A loud bell rings first, when passengers may board 
34 


FROM MOSCOW TO KHARKOV 

the train, a second time when they should, and a third time, 
when they must because the train will start in a few minutes. 

Wednesday, June 1, was a beautiful day, and we enjoyed 
the journey through central and southern Russia. We passed 
Tulsa, Orel (pronounced Aryoll) and Kursk. An amusing 
incident happened at Orel. It was a hot day and we had 
exhausted our supply of drinkables. With one companion, 
I left the train to buy beer. The Russians are used to adding 
figures on a counting machine consisting of a wooden frame 
with wires strung across on which beads are filed. Without 
this device, adding becomes a major operation. When I asked 
the price for eight bottles of beer at sixty kopecks each, the 
waiter meditated a while and said 4.50 rubles. But a guest 
in the restaurant estimated the sum at 4.90 rubles. Finally 
a doctor of medicine, whom I had met in the train, guessed the 
correct price, 4.80 rubles, which I paid. 

A source of curiosity were the many beggars. At each station, 
they appeared. They are artists in making themselves up with 
hundreds of patches. Long beards and long hair seem to be 
indispensable in the profession. They come to the window 
of the train and tell their unintelligible stories. I threw them 
the copper coins which I gathered shopping in Moscow. 
Their numbers are countless. I remember a small boy, who 
got ten kopecks from me. Soon a girl appeared and also re¬ 
ceived ten kopecks. Thereupon, the boy requested her to give 
him five kopecks for having pointed me out to her. Besides 
the beggars, there are vendors of apples, of milk, of cigarettes, 
35 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 

and of flowers; and red-capped policemen, who try to chase 
them away. 

At eight in the evening we arrived in Kharkov and were 
received by several officials and two interpreters who spoke 
English. The officials spoke German but neither French nor 
English. In the train I had met many Russians who spoke 
German, but none who could talk English or French. 

We drove through Kharkov to the Krassnaya Gastinitza 
(Red Inn). Here we were divided into parties of two, each 
party getting a bedroom, a bathroom, and a sitting room. We 
ordered a samovar and cakes. When I ordered two cakes in 
Russian, a loaf of bread was brought. I tried to order cakes 
again, and two roast chickens were brought in. This experience 
showed me how deficient my Russian still was. 

Our trip from Moscow to Kharkov had taken nineteen 
hours and cost sixty rubles per person, besides about eight 
rubles for our entire baggage. The hotel in Moscow charged 
eight rubles per day per person, besides numerous tips. Meals 
at the Savoy Hotel had varied from two to six rubles per 
person. These prices were not exorbitant, since we had the 
best that could be obtained, and that was very good indeed. 

On Thursday morning, June 2, we woke up very early. It 
was daylight at three o’clock and church bells began to ring 
loudly and persistently at an early hour. For it was a Russian 
holiday, the Virgin’s Assumption. There was nothing to do 
but sight-seeing. 

I liked Kharkov. It is a bright and sunny Ukrainian town 
36 


FROM MOSCOW TO KHARKOV 


of about 400,000 inhabitants with much business and building 
going on. Kharkov lies in the best wheat land of Soviet 
Russia and is the commercial center for the great Donetz coal 
field. It lies not very far from the Black Sea and is predestined 
by nature to be the industrial, commercial, and agricultural 
center of southeastern Russia. The Ukrainian girls struck me 
as being very pretty; they were dressed with taste, but simply. 
Most of the men on the streets wore the Ukrainian embroidered 
shirt and riding breeches with high boots and caps. There 
were no elegant costumes anywhere to be seen. 

There are many parks through Kharkov, and all were 
thronged with pleasure seekers. The ubiquitous beggars were 
there, and the wild boys and girls in their rags, also some 
indescribably dirty gypsies. Everywhere was music and singing. 
Orchestras played in all the beer gardens and parks and their 
music was uncommonly good. The old University campus 
is now a public park. People seemed to be happy and joyful. 
The only somber figures were the Russian priests, unkempt and 
in old robes, whose black color has turned green, brown, or gray 
in the many years since they left the tailor shop. 

I met the father of the girl whose silk skirt I had brought 
to Russia, but unfortunately not the girl, who was out of 
town that day. She was to wear the skirt at her graduation 
from high school in a fortnight. In the evening we went 
to a beer garden, had beer with sour black rye bread and 
salt, and listened to music. The beer was mediocre. There 
had been a Bavarian brewery in Kharkov, but the revolutionists 
37 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


destroyed it, and the Russians cannot make first class beer. 

In the beer garden, a beggar began to pester us. The 
waiters tried to move him by gentle persuasion, but the begging 
dervish laid himself flat on the ground and continued his 
perorations from this post for two hours. He was still there 
when we left. We were early warned not to give to beggars. 
The nuisance would become unbearable to us, if it were known 
that the Americanskys had a soft spot for beggars. 

On Friday, we visited the offices of the Bank for Foreign 
Trade and of the Donetz Coal Trust (Donugol), and had 
conferences with officials, assisted by interpreters. Our own 
offices were to be in the Bureau of New Projects called 
“U. N. S.” (Upravlyenye Novoy Stroitelstvey). Everything 
in Russia seems to be called by the initial letters of the some¬ 
what lengthy Russian designations. 

We still ate at the Red Inn at fair prices for excellent food. 
Our room rent was paid by the Donugol. 

We spent Saturday in endless conferences with mining 
engineers and financial experts. Talking is a very important 
business in Russia and is accompanied by the smoking of 
countless cigarettes and occasional tea drinking. The cigarettes 
are bought from peddlers. They have a long mouth piece of 
pasteboard and are called papiroshi . The tea is called tchie 
(ie pronounced as in lie). Everybody was very polite and 
friendly. All of the engineers spoke German, but very few, 
French or English. We arranged for an early trip to the 
Donetz coal field. I bought a pair of Russian linen trousers 
38 


FROM MOSCOW TO KHARKOV 


for six rubles; also a new cap for three rubles—my American 
cap having left me somewhere between Moscow and Kharkov. 
We arranged to go, the next day, to Donbass (abbreviation 
for Donetzky Basin—Donetz Coal Basin). 


39 



Chapter IV 

IN THE MINING REGION 

O N SUNDAY, June 5, we left Kharkov for Bakhmut 
(now officially called Artemovsk) at 11:25 P. M., in 
company with one Russian mining engineer* and one inter¬ 
preter. We had sleeping compartments, but I did not rent 
bedding from the conductor. 

We arrived at Bakhmut at 8 A. M. on Monday, June 6, 
and drove to the clubhouse of the Donugol Trust. Breakfast 
being over, we waited for a meal to be prepared. Meanwhile, 
we were served with tea and fresh cucumbers, picked in a 
near-by garden. Russians eat cucumbers as Americans eat 
bananas. Breakfast consisted of tea, eggs, bread, and butter. 

•Nikolay Andreyevitch Krshishanowsky. He was condemned to death 
during the trial of the Donbass engineers and executed July io, 1928. I liked 
him and we were together a great deal during my stay in Russia. (May the 
earth lie lightly on thee, Nicholas.) 


40 



IN THE MINING REGION 


We took autos to the Vasilyevska Prochodka Mine near 
Krindachevka in the Bokovo-Khroustalsky coal basin and 
stopped at the mine club. The engineers in charge of the 
mine met us and we became friends quickly. One of them 
was the son of a German colonist and spoke perfect German. 
He offered me a much-needed bath in his home. After the 
bath, he treated me to good beer. We did much sight-seeing 
and inspected the place where we were to build a mine, whose 
temporary designation is “16-bis.” The chimney and a portion 
of the mine shaft were already in existence. Around it, we 
were expected to construct our mine. Chimney and shaft had 
been started before the war. Unfortunately, they were in the 
wrong place. 

While in London, I had a happy idea. I bought an ample 
supply of toilet paper and insect powder for our party. Both 
were needed here. Russian toilets are very seldom modern, and 
insects were numerous in our sleeping quarters. The insect 
powder went into action with indifferent success. But we 
slept well, tired as we were from the automobile ride of sixty 
miles over rough ground and plenty of walking afterwards. 

Our automobile ride that day will long be remembered. 
We rode in two fine Mercedes cars, each having cost $10,000. 
Besides the driver, a mechanic sat on the front seat. We 
traveled over the Ukrainian steppe, which looks very much 
like an American prairie, but has only very indifferent roads. 
These can be negotiated in automobiles in summer when they 
are dry, but dusty; in sleighs in winter when they are covered 
41 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


with snow; and only on horseback when they are flooded by 
the season’s rains. Most of the time we drove directly 
over the grass. Certainly all curves were taken that way. 
The big cars shook and trembled during the fast driving over 
this very rough ground. The leading car traveled much by 
guess and the second car followed as closely as possible in 
order to keep from getting lost. If separated, they never would 
have met again. In consequence, the passengers of the second 
car were covered with a crust of dust, when, after a few 
mistaken directions, we happily arrived in Krindachevka. 

The dinner at the club-house consisted of borsch (which is 
a very delicious thick cabbage soup), chicken, pudding, tea, 
and beer. 

The next day, some of us went underground in the 
morning and again in the afternoon. The mines were well 
ventilated, but had low passageways. We had only benzine 
safety lamps which did not give much light. The coal is 
wonderful, but the mines are gaseous. I have never seen better 
anthracite in my life. The coal seams are thin, rather steep, 
and very deep under the surface, as compared with American 
seams. They are situated more like the German coal beds. 
The miners work six hours daily, out of which the time for 
changing of clothes, going underground, coming up, bathing, 
and for changing of clothes again, is taken, leaving only about 
four and one-half hours for actual work. The work on top 
of the mine is done mostly by women, but under the super¬ 
vision of men. 


42 


IN THE MINING REGION 


In the forenoon I had a slight accident and bruised the 
ankle of my right foot. When we returned to the club in the 
afternoon, the doctor was called to inspect my ankle. She 
was a young girl of about twenty-one years. Her first and 
middle names were Lydia Mikhailovna. She had studied one 
year of medicine after graduating from high school. Fortu¬ 
nately, my injury was very slight and really needed no attention. 
The thirteen hundred men employed in this mine depend upon 
the surgical and medical skill of Lydia. She first insisted 
upon putting a moist compress upon my right ankle and later 
wanted to examine my back to see whether a rib was broken. 
After raising my khaki shirt, she tried to pull my union suit 
up, with which she was unfamiliar, since B. V. D/s are 
unknown in Russia. She exclaimed, “Oh, Americansky 
costume.” After this detail had been arranged, she put plenty 
of iodine on my back and arms in order to safeguard me against 
any possible bad results from my fall. At first, I felt a 
considerable itching from the iodine, but slept soundly until 
morning, while my friends fought a battle royal against a 
bedbug invasion which was bigger and better than anything 
we ever had seen in Russia. I concluded that iodine is a good 
antidote against bedbugs. 

At 5:30 the following morning, Lydia Mikhailovna called 
to inquire about my bruised ankle and counseled me to spare 
it for some days. At 6:00, we started on another automobile 
ride of about 120 miles over the steppe. We passed by the 
Skotchinsky Mine, which is called after Russia’s most famous 
43 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


contemporary mining engineer. The mine was nearing com¬ 
pletion. Afterwards, we drove to the Artem Mine,* which 
is at present the largest coal mine in Soviet Russia and makes 
an excellent impression. 

On Thursday, three men of our party went underground 
while two others and I had a conference, lasting all morning, 
with two engineers of the Artem Mine. All items of produc¬ 
tion, cleaning, storage of coal, etc., were gone over, together 
with problems of power, labor, and expense. In this part of 
the Donbass, I saw camels on the steppe. They are used for 
transportation purposes. This was a reminder that we were 
approaching the Orient. 

We boarded a train for Rostov-on-Don at the railway station 
of Shakhtmaya at 1:03 P. M. and arrived in Rostov at 3:30. 
There were Circassian peddlers in the streets and I saw a pretty 
walking stick offered for sale. Price—five rubles; offer—two 
rubles, a sale. I bought it. 

We got our supper at a large amusement park, which was 
crowded with pleasure-seekers, and a special table had to be 
provided for us in front of the restaurant. We attracted 
attention and soon an inebriate comrade wished to join us. 
Our Russian friends mildly protested: “But don’t you see, 
dear comrade, that we are hungry and want to eat in peace?” 
The response was: “But I am lonesome and wish to join you.” 
The argument lasted for more than one hour, when we had 

♦The chief engineer of this Mine was later convicted in the trial of the 
Donbass engineers and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. 


44 




IN THE MINING REGION 


finished our meal and started for another stroll. The would-be 
companion left us with the stinging remark: “I was a great 
hero in the revolution. I know who will be no heroes in the 
next revolution—you!” 

We took a street car to the station, paid the conductress 
(nearly all street-car conductors in Russia are women) fifteen 
kopecks apiece for fare and soon were settled down in our 
sleeping compartments on the train. It left at 8 P. M. for 
Gorlovka, where some more coal mines had to be seen. 

A fellow passenger on the train with whom I entered into 
a conversation pointed out to me the ruins of some magnificent 
mansions that could be seen from time to time. They were 
the burned manors of the great nobles. Revolution and civil 
war had swept over the country side in numerous waves. 
Many great country seats and most of their inhabitants had 
been the victims. 

I was told in the Donbass by the wife of a mine manager 
that their home had eighteen different military occupations 
during one month at the time of the civil war. One morning 
the Cossacks of WrangePs army had left early. In the evening, 
red soldiers of the bolshevik army arrived and, at noon the 
same day, a band of bandits had dropped in. She showed 
me a cannonball which had fallen into her garden during 
these rather exciting times. 

It was a wonderful night. First, the train followed the 
Don River which becomes broader and broader. Finally, the 
river enters the Sea of Azov, which is a bay of the Black Sea 
45 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


between the Caucasus and the Crimean Peninsula. The moon 
was shining over the slowly moving stream that gains a width 
of over two miles at its delta. The Sea of Azov was calm, with 
the moonlight mirrored in the rippling water. Far away, some 
lights were shining from houses on the Caucasian promontory. 
Once this land belonged to the Tartars, later to the Cossacks, 
and now it is a federal republic of the U. S. S. R. During 
the Great War, a German Army penetrated to Rostov and 
held this land with difficulty, because the inhabitants used to 
murder the German sentinels at night. 

Early in the morning, Friday, we arrived in Gorlovka. 
When we stepped out of the train, a man of our party was 
approached by a wild boy, who held his filthy cap against the 
face of our friend and meanwhile picked a gold pencil from 
the engineer’s coat pocket. All this was done so swiftly that 
we could not capture the boy, but someone merely grabbed his 
dirty cap, which was quickly thrown away. It was a practical 
lesson to beware of pickpockets. 

In Gorlovka, we visited a mine and, later proceeded to 
Bayrak, where the coal beds stand at an angle of 70°. It is 
excellent coking coal. 

While some of us went underground, others inspected the 
upper part of the mine and took pictures. We were treated 
to a lunch by Ivan Suffovitch, the director of the mine. It 
consisted of fish, caviar, meat, and fruit soup, which was the 
last course. There was much vodka on the table and constant 
urging to use it. Vodka is potato alcohol of about 40 to 50 


46 



Ivan Suffovitch sang and danced for us, and then hissed 
every one of us on both chee\s 


47 




















" 





•» 




' 

















~ 



































' 






















r|i (■ 












































IN THE MINING REGION 


per cent strength. The meaning of vodka is “dear little 
water.” Since there were not enough glasses, I used a china 
cup for the vodka, and nobody saw that it was usually empty 
when I pretended to drink. This was an excellent idea, because 
it saved me from getting drunk in a very foreign place, far 
away even from the railroad. 

Ivan Suffovitch sang and danced for us, and kissed every 
one of us on both cheeks. I was so glad I had not shaved for 
a week. I felt protected like a porcupine. We hoped to 
escape our genial host, but he joined us in our automobile ride 
to the station at Nikitovka. As he weighed around 300 pounds, 
he filled a large portion of the big car, the rest of us being 
considerably crowded. At the station restaurant, he ordered 
more meat, shellfish, and much cognac for us and himself. 
The meat was a Caucasian dish, called Zatchlik Slices of 
mutton, bacon, and onions had been placed on a wooden stick 
and roasted on an open fire—a wonderful fare for people with 
an appetite, but not for us. 

As our host became very noisy, all the loafers of Nikitovka 
gathered to watch us. We constantly feared arrest by the 
red-capped policemen who were among the spectators. Ivan 
Suffovitch called for more cognac and I told the waiters that 
I would smash any bottle of liquor that was brought to our 
table. I felt that we had all we could stand and rather more 
than less. While I was talking to the waiter, our friend Ivan 
had opened a bottle by himself and drank it out to its last 
drop. Fortunately, his chauffeur arrived just then. I asked 
49 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


him, “How can we get rid of your boss?” He suggested we 
should make a promenade in the direction of the car. Ivan 
Suffovitch took one of us under each arm. The others followed 
and all the loafers of Nikitovka formed the escort. Ivan 
roared like a combination of a steer and a lion and moved 
slowly toward his Mercedes car. He mounted it as though it 
were a platform, starting a speech with, Torarishtchi! (Com¬ 
rades.) The rest of the oration was lost to us, because I 
had handed the chauffeur five rubles and he stepped on the 
gas. The car disappeared around the corner and we were 
left in peace to wait for the train, which was late as usual. 

At Bayrak, we saw a large number of new living houses 
under construction. They looked healthful, comfortable, and 
pretty, and the director of the mine pointed out with pride 
the difference between these new houses and the miserable 
shacks which the private corporations had provided in pre-war 
times for the working-men. The difference was striking, 
especially when the best modern and the worst old habitations 
were compared, which our friends seem to prefer having us do. 
As a rule, we were not influenced or propagandized in our 
visits to industrial plants, but could walk around, inspect, and 
ask questions as we liked. But a natural pride in recent 
industrial and social improvements and a desire to talk about 
them was noticeable among our Russian friends. Russian 
building operations are different from ours. At first, a 
substantial scaffold is created and inside of it grows masonry 
work. The scaffold is sometimes almost as strong as the 
SO 


IN THE MINING REGION 


building, but it is removed when the building is completed. 

There were many boilers, hoists, and coal separators, and 
much other construction material lying around in the mine 
yard ready to be put in place. Some of these objects were 
of Russian origin, but many had German inscriptions, and 
some were American. I never did see any English or French 
machinery in the U. S. S. R. 

The Russian engineers that we met in the Donbass were 
extremely courteous and agreeable. Sometimes, I had the 
privilege of their hospitality in their homes. Usually, I was 
informed by some friend of the first and father’s name of my 
host and hostess and I addressed them accordingly. For 
instance, in the home of Engineer Protopov, I addressed him 
Ivan Sergyevitch and his wife, Sylvia Pavlovna, and both 
called me Adolf Karlovitch. Every Russian has three names: 
his Christian name; for instance, Ivan; then his father’s name 
with the suffix -vitch, like Sergyevitch, the son of Sergy; and 
his family name; for instance, Protopov. Ivan’s sister may 
be called Yulya Sergyeva Protopova, the latter being the 
feminine form of Protopov. Since my middle name is Carl, 
I changed it to Karlovitch in Russia, although my father’s 
name was not Carl. A compromise between my middle name 
in my passport and Russian social requirements had to be 
worked out. 

This custom, which is of long standing, of calling one’s 
friends by their Christian and father’s names and avoiding the 
Russian corresponding to Mr., Mrs., or Miss, makes social 

51 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


contacts in Russia very charming and cordial from the very 
beginning of an acquaintance. This pleasant custom, however, 
seems to be unpopular with the communists, and is becoming 
less general. 

One day, about the beginning of August, an engineer from 
the Kisel Coal Trust called at our office to make arrangements 
for American technical advice to his organization. He called 
up our office by telephone and made an appointment with 
our interpreter to see us in our apartment. When he arrived, 
he could not talk English. Fortunately, our visitor knew 
German well. He had studied mining at the Austrian School 
of Mines in Leoben. He told us a good deal about living and 
working in the Urals, where one of the best deposits of coal 
in the U. S. S. R. is to be found. We discussed Russian coal 
fields in general and were informed that the greatest Russian 
coal deposit is the one at Kusnetz in Siberia, the so-called 
Kusbass. Next comes the Donbass, third, the Moscow Basin 
and, fourth, the Kisel Basin in the Urals. But it is quite 
possible that some of the only partly known or still unknown 
great basins in Siberia and Turkestan might prove to be bigger 
than any presently known Russian field. 

The trend of Russia in heavy industries is toward Asia. 
Western Siberia and Turkestan will sometime be the center 
of Russian metallurgical industry. This is another reason 
why Russia is becoming more Asiatic all the time. 

On Saturday evening, August 20, I started on a new trip 
to the Donbass. I took a cab to the larger railroad station, 
52 


IN THE MINING REGION 


where I met two geologists of the Donugol, my friends, 
Nikolay Nikolayevich and Nikolay Alexandrovich. The 
tickets had been procured during the day and, after being 
refreshed a little at the railroad restaurant, we boarded the 
train. The compartment had four sleeping places and the 
fourth passenger was an elderly civil engineer, as I recognized 
from the insignia on his cap. He and I had the two lower 
berths and the two geologists slept in the upper berths. The 
civil engineer rolled himself into a blanket and soon was asleep, 
while I still looked at his typical old Russian features. He 
was tall and slender, had a friendly expression on his face, 
and wore a forked beard, as many officers and bureaucrats in 
old Russia used to wear. These beards are rarely seen now 
in modem Soviet Russia, most of the men being beardless, 
except for the peasants and cab drivers. 

After a very refreshing rest and a not very punctilious 
morning toilet—shaving is not necessary every day in Russia— 
we reached Sheretovka in the Donbass and changed trains 
for Nikitovka. Breakfast was taken at the station restaurant 
in Sheretovka and consisted of tea, soft-boiled eggs, bread, 
butter, and the inevitable cucumbers. 

Arriving in Nikitovka, we had dinner in the station 
restaurant. The meal consisted of borsch (cabbage soup), 
roast pork, potatoes, omelette, souffle, tea, mineral water, and a 
glass of cognac. It was good. The weather was excellent. At 
the station, a phaeton (in Russian, equipage) waited for us. We 
mounted it and it partly broke down under the heavy weight 
53 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


of Nikolay Alexandrovich. We laughed heartily about the 
mishap. The driver secured a lineykd, to which he harnessed 
his horses. A lineykd is the regular Russian travel car. The 
word means “a ruler,” and the car has this name because of 
its flat, longitudinal top. People sit on both sides of this top 
and put their feet on the running-board below. We then 
drove off to meet our friend, Inokente Ivanovich, and his 
charming wife, Sylvia Mikhaylovna, who were to be our hosts 
for two days in Krindachevka. 

Soon I was comfortably settled in the home of my hosts. 
They had a good bathroom, but they were afraid to leave 
the windows of the house open at night for fear of burglars, 
and I was allowed to open my window only before I went 
to bed. 

The afternoon was spent in visits to the mine structures 
and to see the most important geologic features of the coal 
basin near Krindachevka. Shura, the little girl of our hosts, 
went with us. She wore sandals and a very much abbreviated 
sort of overalls. 

Tramping through the coal basin with its prairies and 
forest patches, country roads, and low hills reminded me very 
much of doing the same thing in southern Illinois. I could 
forget temporarily that I was in the Ukraine. But, when I 
passed a group of Little-Russian peasant girls, who were 
walking home from work, singing and laughing, and were 
dressed in all colors of the rainbow, I doubted that I was in 
Illinois. And, when I remembered that in my field quarters 
54 


IN THE MINING REGION 


were waiting an ice-cold bottle of wine and a large portion of 
caviar, I was quite sure that it was not Illinois. 

In the evening, my hosts, my traveling companions, two 
engineers who lived in the same house, and I sat together with 
a glass of port wine, talking about the world at large and the 
Donetz Basin in particular. I felt very much at home, and 
my host said, “Adolph Karlovitch, we have been together only 
for half a day, but it seems as if we had known each other 
for twenty years.” It is easy to make friends in Russia and 
I never had the feeling of being in a new country. The 
Russians are one of the most lovable races in the world. 

My two Russian friends and I started early Monday 
morning for a trip through the Bokovo-Khroustelsky coal basin, 
which is located near Krindachevka. Part of the time we used 
a car, but mostly we walked. We were joined by a young 
lady geologist from Leningrad, who was working in this region 
for the Geologic Committee of the U. S. S. R., which corre¬ 
sponds in its functions to the Federal Geological Survey (U. S. 
Geological Survey) of America. She had a lineyka and a 
driver and stowed her specimens of fossils and rocks in a bunch 
of hay on the car. Zinaida Vasilyevna seemed to be an able 
field worker and a helpful companion; she secured for me 
many valuable fossil specimens. On our way, we met another 
field worker of the Geologic Committee, whose equipment 
and field clothes were exactly like those of a young 
American geologist. He worked on foot and made a good 
impression on me. Russian geologists have accomplished a 


55 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


great deal of work and seem very competent. Theirs is the 
largest geologic survey in the world, numbering over one 
thousand permanent employees, to whom are added over three 
thousand temporary workers for the summer. The rapid 
exploration of Russia’s enormous mineral resources is due to 
the indefatigable and very efficient work of their geologists. 
Most of them were trained in the famous mining school of 
Leningrad, and their basic training is engineering, not university 
work, as in America or western Europe. There is a professional 
school of geology in the mining school of Leningrad, and 
mining seems to be an excellent approach to the study of 
geology, especially economic geology, which is at present 
Russia’s greatest need. They may not always get as much 
theoretical training as a purely university course would give, 
but their practical training is excellent. 

During the day we saw outcrops of rocks, faults in the 
formations, drill holes, and small country mines, some of 
which were abandoned, and I enjoyed the fresh water coming 
out of a spring in the rocks. It was the best water that I drank 
in Russia and the only water that I dared to drink unboiled. 

My friends showed me interesting formations which indicated 
the boundary line of the Muscovian and Uralian systems of 
Russian coal measures. Both systems are represented in the 
Donetz Basin and their exact line of demarcation is somewhat 
in doubt, because the so-called index fossils are not sharply 
enough divided. One of them is the Spirifer Moscovensis, a 
fossil clam shell, that, in many instances, is very well preserved. 


56 


IN THE MINING REGION 


The evening was again spent in the home of Inokente 
Ivanovich and Sylvia Mikhailovna. 

The next morning we drove to the Amerikanka Mine in 
the Snezhnyansky Basin south of Krindachevka. Before 
reaching it, we passed through the little town, Dofvino- 
Brodskaya, near which the Amerikanka is situated. This 
mine was designed by American engineers; therefore, the name. 
It is nothing of which American engineering needs to be very 
proud. In the early days of the American technical help to 
Russia, many people were employed whose home reputation 
did not warrant the high salaries which the Russians paid them. 

It was a delightful drive through the valleys of the Donbass. 
Pretty Ukrainian villages lay half hidden among little woods. 
The roofs were of straw and the walls glistening white. 

Near one of the villages stood a little church on a hill. 
Its dome was blue and the walls white. Along the road ran 
a high power electric line and the church peeped out behind 
the wires. Its view symbolized the combination of old and 
new Russia. 

In the distance appeared a large power station near a lake. 
Everywhere intensive building operations were going on. This 
activity was a testimony to the energy with which the new five 
year program of the government was being pushed ahead. 
The country seemed wide awake after a thousand or more 
years of sleep. 

When we arrived at the mine camp, it was after one o’clock 
and lunch had been eaten in the various dining rooms where 


57 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


the technical staff usually dined. But the young wife of a 
Russian engineer, who looked after one of these dining rooms, 
set up a good meal for us, which was heartily appreciated. 
I asked her if I might photograph her, to which she cheerfully 
consented. A number of men from the mine office near-by 
crowded into the picture and I invited a policeman to join 
the group. He was so pleased with the honor that he forgot 
to ask me for my permit to take pictures. 

There was plenty of work under way in the mine camp. 
Two slopes were driven into the earth to run more than a 
thousand feet underground. A railroad cut was being broken 
through the limestone bed, which forms part of the surface 
of the land here. A series of deep holes was made in the 
rock with chisels and sledge hammers, all by hand without 
the use of dynamite. Later, the holes were to be connected 
and the rails laid. I wished to take a picture of one of these 
holes, which showed plainly the limestone formation. As 
soon as I had taken out the camera, all workmen lined up 
to be photographed. They could not imagine why I should 
be interested in photographing a rock. I took their picture 
first and, after they were gone, photographed the rock. I 
found the camera very often to be a convenient means of 
gaining the good will of a crowd. To be photographed seemed 
to be quite a satisfaction for the peasants or workmen and, for 
diplomatic reasons, I often went through the motions of 
clicking the camera, with or without films in it. 

Office buildings, engine houses, workers’ homes, houses for 


58 


IN THE MINING REGION 


the officials, shops and foundries were either under construction 
or already operating. Great masses of timber were being cut 
and trimmed, and everywhere the typical Russian working¬ 
men were busy, some with heavy beards, and all wearing the 
Russian shirt, like a blouse, with a belt. 

Later in the afternoon, I met Commissar Georgi Ippolytovich 
with an assistant, Igor Nikolyaevich, in a big German 
Mercedes car. They were going to Artemovsk, there to take 
the train to Kharkov. They invited me to ride with them and 
I had a pleasant drive with the two men, both of whom spoke 
German. It was a long ride of some fifty miles over rough 
country. We passed many villages; the pigs, ducks, and 
chickens scattering in front of the automobile. When we 
arrived in Artemovsk, we found that the train was two hours 
late, and the Commissar invited me to a chicken dinner in 
the park restaurant. We had good music, and the time 
passed quickly under an animated conversation. We talked 
of Russia and America, mostly of various technical matters 
concerning mining. 

When we went to the station, we found that no more tickets 
were to be sold for this train. The Commissar had his pass, 
good on all Russian railroads, but his assistant and I had 
to wait until next morning. So we went to the club-house of 
the Coal Trust and slept there comfortably. 

The next day, when Igor Nikolayevich and I went to 
breakfast in Artemovsk, we saw the town in mourning. Red 
Soviet flags with broad black borders were hanging on all 


59 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


public and many private buildings. The newspapers had 
black borders and big headlines. Sacco and Vanzetti had 
been executed the previous day in the United States. It was 
discussed in my presence, but without impolite remarks to me. 
All Russia was officially mourning for the two dead radicals, 
who were proclaimed martyrs of the proletariat and victims 
of the capitalistic world. 

We took a slow train of so-called hard cars for Kharkov. 
A hard car is very much like a box-car with two tiers of benches. 
People can sit or lie in two, sometimes three, stories of the 
car. It was mostly filled during the ride, and the interest of 
the crowd in the Amerikansky was great. I was always called 
“comrade” and the conversation was slow on account of my 
limited Russian vocabulary. If I did not understand what 
my companions said, they wrote it on paper. As I had no 
dictionary with me, the writing did not help much. But pa¬ 
tience was great on all sides and the feeling always very friendly. 
I felt perfectly at ease in their company and could see the 
most varied types of miners, peasants, woodchoppers, and 
hoboes. They were much concerned about my comfort and 
reprimanded any comrade who crowded me too much in his 
eagerness to get information. At the numerous stops of the 
car, the comrades got apples or water for me. One brought 
me a German newspaper. I shared my cigarettes with them. 
The conversation usually contained three questions, which I 
easily understood and for which I had a ready answer in 
Russian. They were: 


60 


IN THE MINING REGION 


(1) “How much money do you get?” 

Answer: “Twenty-five rubles a day.” (I figured that this 
sum would be neither too large to arouse envy nor too small 
to create contempt.) 

(2) “How much does a Ford car cost in America?” 

Answer: “Nine hundred rubles.” ($450; an answer which 

was not exact, but generally satisfactory.) 

(3) “When will be the revolution in America?” 

Answer: “We have had it already in 1776.” (No country 

is considered in good standing which has not had a revolu¬ 
tion, but, of course, the proletarian revolution is really what 
the comrades had in mind.) 

It was a very hot day, and I was glad when it got evening 
and Kharkov was reached. I had consumed a good many 
bottles of mineral water and some fruit and bread, which were 
obtained at the many stops of the train, also a hasty lunch 
of good soup, meat and potatoes at a station restaurant. 

By Saturday, I had finished the drawings for the under¬ 
ground development of coal mine 16-bis. The life of the mine 
was estimated to be thirty years, with normal production be¬ 
ginning in the third year. The various underground com¬ 
munications, entries, and rooms had to be drawn in different 
colors to indicate clearly where the works would be in any 
given year of the mine’s life. Since the geologic data of this 
field were inadequately known, I had serious doubts about 
the value of such minutely specified forecasts of production, 
ventilation, haulage, etc. I was told not to worry about 


61 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


that, since I would not be made responsible for inaccuracies 
that might show in such a distant future. 

Almost all Russian mining terms are taken from German. 
This made the subject a little easier for me. 


62 



Chapter V 

EXPERIENCES IN KHARKOV 

W E arrived in Kharkov at 5:10 A. M. on Saturday, June 
11th, and the same morning had a conference with 
the chief engineers of the U. N. S. Bureau in the Donugol 
offices. Details for our work were laid out, and we were handed 
a Russian copy of the building rules and mine laws of the 
U. S. S. R., for which we hastened to engage a translator. 

We spent Sunday resting from our trip and working on 
our notes. On Monday, we settled down to regular office 
routine in the U. N. S. Bureau, living the daily life of Rus¬ 
sian engineers, to which were added some of the comforts from 
America and a better income. 

Our office hours were supposed to be from 9 A. M. to 3:30 


63 




GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


P. M., with half an hour’s lunch time at noon. At twelve 
o’clock, a sturdy peasant woman in bare feet walked through 
the corridors of the building ringing a big bell. It meant 
Tchie (tea); presently tea was served in every room in glasses 
and we sent the youngest member of our party to buy pastry. 
At 12:30, the bell rang back to work and at 3:30, everybody 
was supposed to be free for the rest of the day. It happens 
that men in responsible positions always stayed overtime or 
came back in the evening. In the latter case, it was necessary 
to advise the janitor in advance, in order to get into the build¬ 
ing. The janitor had the euphonic title of Commandant . But 
he was always agreeable and friendly, without expecting a 
tip. It must be said in honor of the proletarian regime that 
the proletariat is polite and friendly, at least to Americans. 

I had an experience, the next day, which showed me the 
preference given to American citizens. We had a letter of 
credit to the Vneshtorgbank (Bank of Foreign Trades) in 
Kharkov, and a charming young lady, secretary to the director 
of the Bank, directed our destinies in matters of finance. When¬ 
ever we were in doubt we asked Yelyena Pavlovna. This day, 
I had to exchange German money and thought the matter too 
unimportant to importune Yelyena. By way of explanation, 
I might say that Yelyena is the Russian equivalent for Helen. 
I went directly to the cashier of the Bank of Foreign Trades 
and asked to have 165 Marks changed into Rubles. “Oh, we 
cannot do that,” was the reply. “You must go to the Gosbank 
(Government Bank).” There I went and saw the cashier. 


64 


EXPERIENCES IN KHARKOV 


He introduced me to the assistant cashier, and the latter to his 
secretary. She made out a list of the bills in triplicate, putting 
all series numbers on it. After this was done, I was told to 
go to Window No. 2 for the Rubles. There the teller assured 
me that no dokumenti had arrived yet, meaning the descrip¬ 
tion of the bills. I waited patiently or, rather, impatiently, for 
the dokumenti. Just as I saw a suspicious bundle of papers 
pushed under the teller’s cage and hoped to be through, the 
tchie bell rang. Everybody had tea in the bank, including 
myself. After half an hour, the bell rang to work, and I ex¬ 
pectantly approached Teller No. 2. “Oh, yes,” he said, “these 
are your dokumenti, but I must check them up first.” Another 
half hour passed while the bills and their triplicate descrip¬ 
tions were carefully compared. Finally, I got 80.25 rubles 
and a day’s work was done. Returning, I happened to meet 
Helen and told her my experience, “Oh,” she said, “why did 
you not tell our own cashier that you are an American and 
he would have made the transaction for you in a minute. 
He probably thought you were a German.” 

The following day, a considerable amount of time was con¬ 
sumed with conferences in our office. Everybody seemed to feel 
that they ought to visit with us, shake hands, inquire about 
our work, our health, and stay for a while. There were, of 
course, many official conferences with important government 
engineers, but the number of other calls was greater by far 
and more time consuming. 

The U. N. S. had a whole archive of mine projects, pre- 


65 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


pared by Russians. These were beautiful drawings, but none 
had been executed. Too many pictures and too little coal 
digging, I thought. The Russians felt it themselves and were 
anxious to see more action. But their organizations were still 
too clumsy and over-staffed and not quite practical. This, 
however, was natural. Only a few years had elapsed since the 
chaos of the civil war had given way to order and organization. 
An enormous amount of work had been done during these 
last five years and had given hope for increased efficiency in 
the future. Everybody from the chief engineers to the last 
draftsman was in deadly earnest to work hard. But they 
also watched the Americanskys from whom they expected 
more than miracles. When I walked through the offices of 
the Donugol, I was astonished at the great number of clerks 
and subalterns, filling out blanks incessantly with endless 
statistics and reports. I wondered who read them and where 
they could be filed. The proportion of office work to coal 
production seemed ludicrous to anybody familiar with the 
extreme simplicity of American business administration. 

However, many of the Russian engineers are highly trained 
and educated men; it was a great pleasure to collaborate with 
them and often to learn from them. 

Jones, an American mining man in Kharkov, and I took 
a stroll in the great public park late in the afternoon on Thurs¬ 
day. He had been here for nearly a year and expected soon 
to leave Kharkov. He was a practical mining man and his 
opinion of Russia was based on seeing and not at all on 


66 


EXPERIENCES IN KHARKOV 


reading. He had had a rather easy time here, being a specialist 
in shaft sinking and no shaft had been sunk yet by the group 
of engineers to which Jones belonged. He had little faith in 
the development of Russia. He did not see the larger picture 
of economic evolution, but only the small activities around him. 
He said that the Russians are great in projecting and poor in 
executing. That may be true to a considerable degree. But 
why should not the Russians be able to change their tem¬ 
perament? The Germans did it during the industrial revo¬ 
lution in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and the 
English in the earlier part of the same century. The Rus¬ 
sians are having their industrial revolution right now, and 
there is no a priori reason for their not succeeding in it. 

I usually left the office at four in the afternoon and, on the 
way to our apartment, purchased an afternoon paper in Rus¬ 
sian and inquired at the newspaper kiosks for German papers, 
the only foreign papers which are sold everywhere in Kharkov. 
The Berlin papers were always one week old. I found the 
Berliner Tageblatt, Vossische Zeitung , Frankfurter Zeitung, 
and, especially, the German communist paper, Rote Fahne. 
One day I saw another German communist paper, Der Kol- 
onist , published in southeastern Russia, but I did not see it 
more than once. 

Kharkov had several morning papers, among which The 
Communist and The Kharkov Proletarian were the most im¬ 
portant, as well as an afternoon paper, The Evening Radio. 
When the Radio was due, a horde of newsboys would be wait- 


67 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


ing for packages to be thrown from trucks. Having secured 
their papers they ran screaming “Radio” through the streets. 
A copy costs five kopecks. The paper was rather small, and 
I managed to read it with the help of a dictionary, starting 
with the headlines. The advertisements attracted me. They 
had to do mostly with personal services such as language in¬ 
struction, the sale of second-hand stuff, lost and found, theat¬ 
rical shows and concerts. 

All business was in government hands. Its advertising was 
educational, not competitive, and was done by posters. There 
were plenty of posters on the walls of the streets and in show 
windows, many of them political, usually with a sharp sting 
at capitalism in general and at England in particular. 

At four-thirty, we had dinner in our apartment, cooked by 
our own Russian cook under the supervision of our Russian 
housekeeper. The cook’s name was Marya and the house¬ 
keeper had the nickname “Mumsey.” She was a dear old 
soul of over sixty; she sat up nights when we had gone out, 
to let us in, and to cook tea for us, if we wanted it. She called 
us to our meals with the word Kushat which means some¬ 
thing like “soup’s on.” 

My friend Jones had warned me that it was necessary to 
have a permit for taking pictures. Otherwise, I ran the risk 
of having my camera confiscated by a policeman. I had sus¬ 
pected such a rule in Russia, but had risked a number of snap¬ 
shots already. On Saturday, the 18th, I made a formal ap¬ 
plication to the Ukrainian Government for a permit and was 


68 


EXPERIENCES IN KHARKOV 


requested to submit a list of the objects that I would like to 
photograph during my future stay in the Ukraine. I made 
the list as large and comprehensive as a sheet of paper, legal 
size, permitted. 

Our apartment had one dining room, six bedrooms, a bath¬ 
room and a kitchen. Our party used four of the bedrooms, 
while one was occupied by two girls, Eta and Paula, who 
worked in offices, and one was used by Marya, Mumsey’s 
neice, Yulya, and Mumsey’s adopted boy. A cat and a dog 
completed the number of inhabitants. Eta and Paula had 
occupied their room long before we got in and could not be 
dislodged, because occupation means practical possession of 
living quarters. But they were modest and did not bother us. 

Breakfast was served at eight and consisted of cocoa, cream 
of wheat, bacon, eggs, and fruit. The dinner was a substantial 
meal of soup, meat, vegetables, and a dessert, all of excellent 
Russian and French cuisine. The food for our party of six, 
for the servants, and Mumsey’s relatives, ten persons in all, 
cost from fifteen to twenty rubles a day or seven and a half 
to ten dollars. This included the laundry of the bed, bath, and 
table linen. Our personal laundry was taken care of by an 
elderly laundress, who dumped the whole of it on the dining¬ 
room table and left it to us to pick out our belongings. Her 
bill was made out in Russian, and the spelling of our names 
was highly amusing. Since the house belonged to the gov¬ 
ernment, we had no rent to pay. Rents are in general very 
nominal in Russia, since all houses belong to the municipalities 


69 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


or to the government; they are in proportion to incomes and 
at a very moderate rate. 

I kept the account, and Mumsey was very anxious to prove 
her honesty; therefore, she pestered me with infinite details. 
I also had to make the menu each night for next day. Mumsey 
went marketing every morning and came home in a cab loaded 
with foodstuffs. 

Every evening before going to bed, we had tea and candies 
or fruit. The quiet life without telephone calls, with little 
correspondence, and not much newspaper reading, agreed 
with all of us and we found ourselves gaining considerably 
in weight. 

Naturally, we had to do some shopping, which was always 
a source of amusement. Everything was sold in government 
stores or cooperatives. The grocery stores had most of the 
things we could get in Chicago and were usually full of people, 
especially on Saturday evening. Everywhere we received re¬ 
ceipts, and bookkeeping seemed to be much of a time-con¬ 
suming occupation of the tradespeople. Even the government 
barber shop where we had our hair cut gave a receipt and 
had an intricate system of bookkeeping. The chief barber 
had been in the U. S. A. and understood an American hair¬ 
cut. The price was thirty kopeks (fifteen cents). 

I did the purchasing of wine, cognac, champagne, and kim- 
mel schnaps myself. There were two great wine stores in 
Kharkov, called Vintorgs. One of them was managed by 
a Persian, who had a beard with a permanent wave in it; he 


70 


EXPERIENCES IN KHARKOV 
had a German girl as his assistant. The price of excellent 
Russian port wine was about four rubles a gallon; of good 
cognac, 4.90 rubles a quart; and of imported French cham¬ 
pagne, eight rubles. Good domestic champagne cost 3.50 
rubles a quart, but kimmel schnaps, made in Riga, cost 4.50 
rubles. 

The most interesting place was the Ikratorg, meaning caviar 
store. There stood numerous barrels filled with all kinds 
of delicious fresh caviar. The purchaser tasted each one and 
decided what he wanted. There was a china bowl with little 
chips of wood for sampling the caviar; they were thrown away 
afterwards. Very best caviar cost about 1.80 rubles a pound. 
We always had a big can of caviar on our dining-room table 
and ate as much of it as we wished. Ice was expensive. One 
could buy, for a special occasion, a little loaf of ice, wrap it in 
paper, and carry it home. 

We found it difficult to get good soap or fountain-pen ink. 
Gillette razor blades were three rubles a blade. Toothpaste 
is called chlorodont; it was made after a German prescription 
in Russia. Eau de Cologne was excellent. Candies were also 
good, and French pastry the best I ever tasted. Russian tea, 
once famous in Europe, was now mediocre, and cigarette to¬ 
bacco not very good. Coffee was unobtainable. We bought 
few other things. Once someone among us accidentally broke 
the umbrella of our translator. I got the best I could find in 
the bazaar of Kharkov. It cost twenty-two rubles and was 
wretched. In the windows, I saw shoes for ten rubles a pair and 


71 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


suits for one hundred rubles, but nothing very good. We never 
saw silk stockings. In fact, girls usually did not wear stock¬ 
ings on warm days. Woolen goods also were absent. 

There were some antique shops where old bric-a-brac and 
furniture of pre-war manufacture were sold, among other 
things much fine porcelain and glassware at reasonable prices. 
I never saw jewelry in Russia. It must have been rather rare 
or hidden. 

To stroll along the streets after work was an entertainment 
which I often enjoyed. The most different types of people 
passed by. The intellectual and office worker always carried 
a brief case. This distinguished him from the working man. 
Both types usually wore the same kind of clothes—an em¬ 
broidered shirt worn outside as a blouse and belted at the 
waist, riding breeches, and boots, besides a cap. If the man 
was a graduate of an engineering school he wore his round 
military cap with a blue velvet trimming, showing the in¬ 
signia of his occupation: hammer and pick for mining; ham¬ 
mer and wrench for mechanical engineering; anchor and ham¬ 
mer for marine engineering; and so on. It is astonishing to 
see the number of blue-trimmed caps hanging on the walls of 
the offices, indicating men doing clerical work who have studied 
some kind of engineering. The School of Mines in Leningrad 
(Gorny Institut ) is one of the most famous of its kind. 

Going home one day from the office, I saw a prisoner, es¬ 
corted by two infantry soldiers, pass on the street. Prisoners 
and their escorts never use the sidewalk, but only the driveway. 


72 


EXPERIENCES IN KHARKOV 


One soldier walked ahead and the second behind the prisoner. 
Both had their bayonets fixed. The prisoner had a blond 
Van Dyke beard, eye-glasses, a Russian shirt, and unbleached 
linen clothes, with the trousers tucked in his boots. His coat 
was thrown over his left arm. Apparently, he was an edu¬ 
cated man. I wondered why he had been arrested. Perhaps 
he had been traveling without papers, or making himself 
suspected of counter-revolutionary activities. It seemed to be 
quite as easy to be arrested in Soviet Russia then as it was 
in old times. 

After my return from the Donbass, I engaged a teacher 
to give me lessons in Russian grammar and conversation three 
times a week. That left the other evenings for study, if I was 
not otherwise engaged. My teacher was a young woman, the 
wife of an architect. She read Russian with me in one corner, 
while her husband worked on his drawings on the big table 
in the middle of their only room. We all smoked cigarettes 
most of the time. When the lesson was over, we chatted about 
Russia and America. Anna Alexeyevna spoke beautiful Rus¬ 
sian and also excellent English. She had never been outside 
of Russia, yet her English was perfect, except for a soft Slavonic 
accent which gave it a melancholic, musical touch. Her 
teacher was an old Irishman, who was still Professor of English 
at the University of Kharkov. He lived quietly, an almost 
legendary figure, among his books and bottles. 

Our apartment was on the fourth floor of a house in 
Sumskaya Street, which is one of the main thoroughfares of 


73 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


the town, leading in a northeasterly direction from the center 
of Kharkov into the country. 

The Sumskaya had now a new official name, Karl Lieb- 
knecht Street, but cabman, postman, and everybody else still 
called it Sumskaya. Along it, we went downtown every 
week day to our office on the Nikolaevskaya Square. From 
our windows in the Donugol Building, we could see on the 
opposite of the Square the magnificent building of the All 
Ukrainian Central Executive Committee, which, before the 
revolution, was the seat of the Nobles’ Assembly. At a right 
angle to the Sumskaya, the First of May Street, better known 
under its old name, Moskovskaya, crosses the Nikolaevskaya 
Square. It is the main business street in Kharkov. 

Walking back to our house from the office, we passed the 
Theatre Square, in front of the Ukrainian State Theatre. In 
the Square, stand the monuments of Gogol and Pushkin, 
classics of Russian literature. 

Proceeding on the Sumskaya, north of our apartment house, 
we come to the campus of the old University of Kharkov. It is 
now a public park, but has still the statue of Karazin, the 
founder of the University. 

All of the great athletic fields and the principal public parks 
of the town lie on the Sumskaya. 

When I had to receive change at the ticket office of an 
amusement place, the cashier would hand me a few bank 
notes and lay on top some silver and copper coins and wait 
for me to take it. Being rather familiar with Russian cur- 


74 


EXPERIENCES IN KHARKOV 


rencies, I would also wait instead of taking the money. Then 
the cashier would add a few more small bank notes and coins 
and wait. Knowing that I was still short-changed, I would de¬ 
mand the balance of the change which was due and duly 
receive it. 

Similar things happened in a bank where we drew money 
on our letter of credit. The cashier tried the same trick when 
exchanging dollars into rubles. Unsuccessful in his first at¬ 
tempt, he would drop a bill from the bottom of his pile when 
he passed the money through his window. Finally, he suc¬ 
ceeded in shortchanging us for ten rubles, in spite of our 
watchfulness. The mistake being soon discovered, one of us 
went back to the bank to claim the ten rubles. The cashier 
smilingly said to him: “How glad I am that you returned. 
You left ten rubles here and I was just going to send for you.” 

But we found little dishonesty in our dealings with stores. 
Whatever small errors occurred were probably due to deficient 
arithmetic. 

Dishonesty is considered a severe anti-social crime in Soviet 
Russia; a crime that must be suppressed at all costs. Even 
gratuities to officials bring great danger upon the recipient 
and throw a very bad light upon the donor. 

I familiarized myself with the various stores where I had to 
do business, particularly with the Vintorg (Wineshop), with 
the Cooperative (Grocery store), and with a barber-shop where 
an American haircut was obtainable. A barber is called in 
Russian Perriickenmacher , which is really a German word 


75 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


meaning “wig-maker.” It dates from the time when a bar¬ 
ber’s main occupation was to make and sell wigs, which must 
have been in the seventeenth century. Probably at that time 
Russians became initiated in the art of hair-cutting and shav¬ 
ing. There are many other ancient German words in the 
Russian language; for instance, Feldsher , which originally 
meant a field-barber, but is now used in Russia for army sur¬ 
geons, who, in a former century, had also to cut the soldiers’ 
hair. 

One day, when I went to the barber-shop where American 
style haircuts are given, nobody was in the chairs and yet I 
had to wait for over half an hour until the head barber could 
wait on me. He explained that the government auditor and 
the bookkeeper of the shop could not agree and he had to 
help straighten out the accounts. He said one-half of the pro¬ 
ceeds are divided among the employees of the shop and the 
other half goes to the government, which owns and operates 
the shop. This barber was a Jew who had worked in New 
York, where he expected to return in a short time. He had 
already waited six months for permission to leave but expected 
to get it soon, being an American citizen, although born in 
Russia. I asked him whether it would not be better to have 
a barber-shop owned and managed by an independent boss, 
rather than by the government. He said: “No, in our way 
more people get an income than where one man alone gets 
most of the profit. Here is less of a profit for one, but em¬ 
ployment for more men.” There seems to be a tendency in 


76 


EXPERIENCES IN KHARKOV 


Russia to combat unemployment by creating as many jobs as 
possible. The situation almost reminded me of municipal 
government in America. 

On July 4th we held a celebration. Our Russian servants 
had surprised us by decorating the dining room with streamers 
and American flags they had made out of colored tissue paper. 
It did not matter that neither the stars nor the stripes had the 
right numbers, nor that that blue looked more purple than blue. 
Several American and Russian friends had been invited, and 
a liberal amount of champagne and wine had been put in a 
tub filled with ice water. The cook had exerted herself to pre¬ 
pare a magnificent dinner. There was fruit soup, cabbage 
soup, breaded fried chicken (called Backhandel in Vienna), 
pudding, cakes, fruit, candy, cheese, and fresh caviar, all pro¬ 
vided in immense quantities. A successful Russian dinner 
must not only excel in quality, but also in quantity. There are 
always poor relatives of the servants to take what is left. 

Patriotic speeches were made and the U. S. A. was toasted 
in champagne, until a delightful merriment had taken hold 
of the diners. It may be said in favor of the Russians that they 
rarely over-indulge in alcoholic beverages and certainly not 
when they are guests. But one of our American friends next 
day had a strange story to tell about getting home. 

On a Sunday forenoon some of us made an excursion into 
the great public park and roamed in the woods and meadows. 
There were three men and three women. The latter were my 
teacher of Russian, Anna Alexeyevna, and her two young 


77 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


friends, Nata and Lola. Nata spoke excellent English, being 
the daughter of an Englishwoman and a Russian. She was 
dark-haired and had a brunette complexion. Lola spoke only 
Russian. She was very blonde and showed the most beautiful 
teeth when she smiled. We had taken our camera with us 
and took moving pictures of the company and of the public. 

One of our men, who had had an inflamed eye for several 
days, wanted to buy a boric acid solution and an eye-cup from 
a drug-store. The Russian name for boric acid was supplied 
by one of our friends and a pharmacist sold us the solution and 
cup. We tested the solution before using it and became sus¬ 
picious of it. Upon examination, it turned out to be a con¬ 
centrated solution of hydrogen peroxide, strong enough to 
put the man’s eyes out. Caution, it seemed, was a very neces¬ 
sary virtue in Russia. 

One day a number of German mining men appeared in the 
Donugol Building. They had an office on the fourth floor. 
Two engineers were in charge of the group and the remainder 
were Obersteiger (mine foremen). All seemed to be jolly 
good fellows and we soon got acquainted. 

On July 19th we moved into the newly completed portion 
of the Donugol Building, where we had two rooms instead of 
one as in the old office. We were now located on the fourth 
floor and it took a good deal of hard work to carry the desks 
upstairs. One of the workmen said, “Look here, see how 
dirty I am. They promised me five rubles for moving your 
furniture and they gave me two. When we were promised 


78 


EXPERIENCES IN KHARKOV 


five rubles under the Tsars, we got them.” A G. P. U. man 
passed by, but paid no attention to the disgruntled worker. 
If an engineer had said this and not a proletarian, he would 
have been promptly arrested. 

On one occasion I had a row with one of the Russians in 
our office. He was the only unpleasant character with whom 
I had personal contact in Russia. Nikolay Sonoffovitch was 
usually impudent, greedy, and a great bluffer. A few days 
before, he had admired my projector for mechanical drawing 
and admitted that he needed one very much and had looked 
for one in various stores in Moscow and Leningrad. I pre¬ 
sented him with the inexpensive instrument, having two. The 
next day I heard from an American friend that Nikolay had 
asked him what the instrument’s purpose was and how it could 
be used. On another occasion Nikolay had told us how he 
had killed a wealthy man and his family when he was a revo¬ 
lutionary general on the Volga. He had held the heads of 
his victims under water until they were dead. Some other 
details are hard to describe. On the day of which I am speak¬ 
ing, Nikolay, whose desk stood near the door of my office, 
had many callers, who never kept the door shut. My desk 
was near the window and covered with papers and drawings 
which were continually being blown off by the draft when the 
door was open. I asked Nikolay to keep the door shut and 
received an impudent reply. I said, “Look out, man, I am 
from Chicago,” and reached for my hip pocket, pretending to 
draw a gun on him. There was none in my pocket, but Nikolay 


79 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


made one leap to the door and disappeared. Early in the after¬ 
noon, he opened the door cautiously and asked, “Adolf Karlo- 
vitch, do you still have your gun with you?” “Yes, Nikolay 
Son-off-o-vitch” (slightly mispronounced on that occasion). 
He returned a few hours later to his desk and was very quiet. 
After that he seemed to be considerably chastened. 

On Saturday, at noon, I had to send a business cable to 
Chicago, and went to a branch telegraph office, which in Russia, 
as everywhere on the Continent, is combined with a postoffice. 
The charge for a regular cable was 23 rubles, 20 kopeks. I 
asked to send the cablegram at the deferred rate. A deferred 
cablegram is posted on Saturday and delivered on Monday, 
and costs about half the price of a regular message. The 
telegraph clerk had never heard of a deferred cable and re¬ 
fused to accept half rates. I asked for the director of the office. 
He, too, knew nothing of deferred cablegrams. I said, “I 
know that it can be sent, and you send it. Here are 16 rubles 
and 60 kopecks.” His answer was: “If you, sir, order it, 
we have to do it.” The cablegram went through. 

This experience shows how suggestible Russians frequently 
are and reminded me of a story told me by a former Austrian 
prisoner of war in Russia, who now lives in America. It 
happened just after the Bolshevik revolution, when discipline 
had become slack in the prisoners’ camp. My friend, who 
had been an officer in the Austrian army, went to the Rus¬ 
sian colonel in command of the camp and said, “I am going 
to run away.” The colonel replied, “I am not supposed to 


80 



“Loo\ out, man, I am from Chicago ” and reached for my 
hip poc\et—Nikolay made one leap for the door 

81 
























EXPERIENCES IN KHARKOV 


know such things in advance.” “But I cannot run away in my 
gray Austrian uniform pants; give me your black Russian 
trousers.” The pants were exchanged and the prisoner escaped. 

Toward the end of July, our water supply was cut off because 
of necessary repairs in the main line supplying our apartment 
building. The bad situation lasted for several days, and the 
house manager blamed our servants for not having stocked 
up with drinking water when notified in advance of the re¬ 
pairs. A few days later, we were warned of another cut-off in 
the near future. I noticed that Mumsey filled the bathtub, 
and, since Eta and Paula went just the same to take their daily 
bath, I decided not to drink any more water, boiled or un¬ 
boiled, at least until the pipes functioned again in the regu¬ 
lar way. 

When at last I received from an official of the Ukrainian 
government the permit to take photographs, it read in the 
Ukrainian language— “Adolph Karlovitch Noe is permitted to 
take pictures of churches, trees, and parks only” The offi¬ 
cial added orally, “Be sure not to take pictures of railway sta¬ 
tions and bridges, because they are military objects.” I had 
waited over five weeks for this permit and had anticipated it 
by nearly one hundred pictures. A photographer in Kharkov 
developed them. He was an artist, but not a technician, and 
my films and prints show traces of his fingers and nails. He 
ruined some of my photographs completely and lost others. 

I decided to carry the permit together with my identification 
card as an employee of the Donugol, and in the future brazenly 


83 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


look at any policeman, who should catch me making pictures 
of ‘churches, trees, and parks,” but otherwise to be as circum¬ 
spect as before. 

On the morning of August 20th I had a conference with 
the chief engineer of the Yugostal. This word is an abbre¬ 
viation for Southern Steel Trust. Yu go means “south” in 
all Slavonic language, as in the name for the country of the 
southern Slavs—Yugoslavia. I took an interpreter along, 
although I had visited the Yugostal alone formerly, trusting 
to my few words of Russian and to the ability of the Russian 
engineers to speak German or French. The interpreter, of 
course, was a convenience because she could talk Russian to 
the Russians and English to me. Interpreters are not always 
to be trusted, but Alexandra was the most reliable translator 
we had known, and she never failed us. 

We hired a cab. The cabman wanted one fare and the in¬ 
terpreter offered a different one, until both sides were satisfied. 
Then the cab driver said, “This man would have been willing 
to pay what I asked, but you prevented it.” Thereupon Alex¬ 
andra replied, “But this man is my master and I am working 
for him.” The irony was that Alexandra had been, before 
the revolution, one of the richest landowners in the Ukraine, 
worth millions of rubles. The conference ended with the 
promise of the Yugostal engineers to visit us in our offices 
and to talk about a new contract with us. 

Sunday afternoon, August 28th, I attended a party given 
by the German vice-consul in his bachelor quarters. The 


84 


EXPERIENCES IN KHARKOV 


young men of the consulate and a few others were present. 
We had a delightful time. Everybody in the crowd was a 
far-and-wide traveled man. I met there a charming elderly 
gentleman, whom I took for a German. We walked home 
together, and I discovered that my friend was an Irishman 
and professor of English in the University of Kharkov. Only 
then did I have him placed. He was the English teacher of 
the woman who instructed me in Russian. She had told me 
a great deal about Mr. K. He had lived there for about twenty 
years. War, revolution, and civil war never bothered him. 
He spoke Russian, as well as English and German, and prob¬ 
ably a few more languages, was a bachelor, and found com¬ 
plete happiness in his little room with a few books, a little 
cognac, and tobacco. If fate had dropped him in Tokyo, Rio 
de Janeiro, or Teheran, he would have become equally useful, 
happy and popular as he was in Kharkov. Life to him was a 
job, friends, a smoke, and some liquor. Men like him flourish 
everywhere except in prohibition lands. 


85 



Chapter VI 

ECHOES OF THE WAR AND OF THE 
REVOLUTION 

O NE day early in July I was invited to tea by some Rus¬ 
sian friends, where I made the acquaintance of a woman 
who had owned a beautiful country house in the Crimea. 
There she had seen every day, during the civil war, long lines 
of prisoners march by on their way to execution. They were 
army and navy officers, also loyal soldiers of the Tsar, judges, 
doctors, lawyers, merchants, all victims of the revolution, coun¬ 
ter-revolution, and civil war. The executions took place in 
trenches where the condemned were lined up against machine 
guns. The trench became the common burial ground. Of 
those who had formed the ruling class in Russia before the revo¬ 
lution, from two to three millions were exiled or fled. A simi¬ 
lar number died at home from starvation, sickness, or by exe- 


86 


ECHOES OF WAR AND REVOLUTION 


cution. Such as are left of these people in Russia exist in 
various circumstances, some in government positions, others 
in poverty and misery. Only women are left of the old Rus¬ 
sian aristocracy. 

On an evening a few days later, we had a conference with 
some Russian engineers in the so-called Officers’ Club. It 
is a typical military casino building so common on the con¬ 
tinent wherever large garrisons are found. Now it is used for 
all kinds of club and committee meetings. A great brown 
bear stands mounted in an upright position in the vestibule 
of the Officers’ Club. I fancied that generals and officers of 
Cossack regiments, as well as of many other military units 
of the old-time Tsarist army, half European and half Asiatic, 
must have gathered and caroused in these rooms in past 
years. How the decorations and gold braids had sparkled, 
how it had smelled of vodka, cognac, kimmel, eau de Cologne, 
boot polish, and human perspiration in those wild days and 
nights, when drunken Grand Dukes were worshipped like 
demigods by equally drunken courtiers! How many thou¬ 
sands of rubles may have changed hands here at faro or 
rouge et noir! Yet all this splendor was blown into Hades 
overnight. 

The Russian revolution made a much more thorough job 
than the famous French revolution of 1789. The latter must 
have been child’s play compared with the Russian volcano. 
In Russia, the dynasty, the nobility, the proprietors of any 
kind, and the merchants, have been disposed of completely 


87 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


and absolutely. There is good reason to believe that even the 
former middle class will, in the time of one generation or less, 
completely disappear and an entirely new type of society 
built up exclusively from the industrial and peasant proletariat 
will form the Russian nation or nations. Members of the old 
bourgeoisie are tolerated in jobs as long as they cannot be 
replaced, but no longer. Their children have little chance of 
getting a higher education, as long as there are applicants 
from the peasant and worker classes. Gradually all jobs wifi 
be filled by proletarians and the children of the bourgeoisie 
will become proletarianized, if they do not escape abroad. 

An American engineer, with whom I walked down Sum- 
skaya Street, told me what he had heard some time earlier, 
before we arrived in Kharkov. During the Civil War, a mob 
moved here from house to house killing every landlord and 
his family. Only one proprietor escaped, and he is now serv¬ 
ing as janitor for his former property. My friend told also 
various other tales of revolutionary atrocities. Women were 
hung up by their legs until they died. Sometimes a fire was 
lighted below the suspended bodies. The sailors of the Black 
Sea Fleet threw the officers in the furnaces under the boilers 
or tied cannon balls on their legs and dumped them overboard. 
When, later, a diver went down, he became insane from seeing 
the bodies standing upright on the sea bottom and swinging 
with the water currents. A woman whose family had owned 
immense estates in the Ukraine was made penniless by the 
revolution. In order to support her children, she begged a 


88 


ECHOES OF WAR AND REVOLUTION 


sack of flour from peasants living near her former land. The 
sack she carried on her back for several miles to Kharkov. 
There she took the railroad to Odessa and bartered the flour 
for ribbons and cotton goods. These she brought back to 
Kharkov and exchanged them again for flour which in turn, she 
took to Odessa. This trading went on for two years. The 
railroad trips were often made upon the roof of a car in the 
Russian winter night. The woman had no shoes, only rags 
on her feet, no overcoat, no real winter clothes. 

What an infinite sum of misery accumulated in Russia dur¬ 
ing the World War, Revolution, and Civil War, no human 
imagination can grasp. I often asked Russians how the peas¬ 
ants, whom I only knew to be kind-hearted, sympathetic folk 
could have turned into the wild beasts which they were during 
the Civil War. I was told there had been a mental epidemic, 
a mania of killing all over Russia. Then, too, all of the pris¬ 
ons had been thrown open and the criminals given a free hand. 

I saw several men who possessed red tickets that gave them 
precedence over everybody else at a ticket office, at any waiting 
line, and probably on many other occasions. The ticket meant 
that its owner had been imprisoned under the Tsarist govern¬ 
ment. Some of these red ticket holders were now the most 
mild-faced and confidence-inspiring men. 

I had a talk with my Russian language teacher, Anna Alex¬ 
eyevna, about Austrian prisoners of war. She and her hus¬ 
band had employed one as a coachman during the war. He 
was an educated man and seemed to have been well treated. 


89 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


The Russians were probably as generous to the prisoners of 
war as their means and their very limited organization per¬ 
mitted. I frequently thought, when traveling in Russia, how 
the German and Austrian prisoners of war must have fared. 
Hygiene, cleanliness, and sanitary water supply were none 
too good for the traveler with ample means. What must 
they have been for a helpless prisoner? Officers were taken 
care of a little better, but how terrible must have been the fate 
of the common soldier, who fell victim to sickness, was inade¬ 
quately protected against cold, improperly fed, and forced 
to live for years under standards of living even below those 
of the Russian peasantry. When the revolution broke out, 
conditions became worse. The scanty food rations stopped, 
transportation home was not available; as vagabonds, beggars, 
doing odd jobs of any sort, the prisoners of war tramped home¬ 
wards, some taking the route through Vladivostok, Japan, and 
the United States. The repatriation of these unfortunates 
took years and many died meanwhile. Some settled in Siberia 
and married native women. 

In the window of an art store I saw the copy of a famous 
painting by Veretchagin. It shows a long line of political 
exiles under the tsars struggling across a mountain pass in 
the deep snow. There are men and women of all ages, mostly 
educated people, all sent to Siberia for revolutionary activities 
or merely for being suspected of such. Some are falling by 
the wayside, others drag themselves along. Their mounted 
Cossack escort uses whips and lances in driving them. The 


90 


ECHOES OF WAR AND REVOLUTION 


road seems endless as it is in reality. After the strongest had 
survived the march from a railroad station in the Urals to 
a distance of a thousand or more miles in Siberia, they could 
expect a living death in prisons, concentration camps, lead 
mines, or among the savages of the frozen north. Some sur¬ 
vived and even returned, were perhaps sent to Siberia a second 
and a third time. Some escaped. But in the hearts of all and 
in the hearts of their friends and relatives accumulated a hatred 
for the ruling class of Russia which, during the two hundred 
years of political persecution, increased and finally burst, like 
a storm that had been gathering strength. These people and 
their descendants became the revolutionists of the intelligentsia 
class, who overthrew tsarism. Many of them are now in the 
ranks of communism. 

The former ruling class was crushed and destroyed by the 
Revolution. Only women were left. Their husbands, brothers, 
and fathers have escaped from the country or are dead. The 
former noblewomen, and wives and daughters of landowners, 
diplomats, army officers, bureaucrats, and priests now live in 
abject poverty or eke out a meager existence as private tutors, 
translators, or menial workers. They hate the Revolution in 
impotent rage. 

There is a third class of educated people in Russia. They 
belong to the old intelligentsia, the doctors, lawyers, engineers, 
business managers, journalists, and teachers, who disliked the 
autocracy of the Tsars more or less, but held good jobs and 
had a comfortable living. Many of them dislike the revo- 


91 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


lutionists, but none wants the autocracy to return. Most of 
them are serving the state in various capacities. They are 
silent and it would be dangerous for them to disagree with 
the present rulers. “The intelligentsia is waiting,” I was told 
by one of them. They expect that the communistic state will 
gradually blend into a democratic republic with free speech, 
freedom of the press, and free political life. For them, the 
present is a passing phase of the great Revolution, the dawn 
following the night of autocracy and preceding the daylight 
of freedom. 

These are the three classes of socially and politically articulate 
persons in Russia—the revolutionists, the tsarists, and, between 
them, the broad group of the liberal intelligentsia. 


92 



Chapter VII 

SOCIAL CUSTOMS AND CITY LIFE 

ALMOST daily we could see processions on the Sumskaya, 
X X mostly of young athletes, with red banners, marching in 
military order to the athletic grounds. The sunburnt bodies 
of the young men and women, whose legs, arms, and shoulders 
were bare, looked strong and healthy. They seemed to be 
proud and self-possessed. Other processions consisted of 
factory and office workers, marching for some political purpose, 
with red banners inscribed with the particular reason for the 
demonstration. 

The purposes might be such as a protest against the English 
raid on the Russian Trading Company in London, the 
assassination of the Soviet Ambassador Voykoff in Warsaw, 
or merely a demonstration against capitalism or an expression 


93 





GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


of sympathy with the strikers in some foreign country, and 
similar things. There seems to be a demonstration nearly 
every day, usually after working hours. The office workers 
can be recognized by their brief-cases. While participation 
in these demonstrations is optional, non-participation is looked 
upon with disfavor. 

A very impressive form of procession is the numerous 
funerals. The coffin is always carried open and the corpse 
can be seen. All decorations are in red. At a very pompous 
funeral, I saw attendants in red cocked hats, with broad red 
scarfs and red coats. They reminded me of the more expensive 
funerals of forty years ago in Austria, which used to be called 
pompes funebres. But there, black was the color of mourning; 
here, red. Usually three strong girls in athletic costume open 
a communist funeral. The one in the center carries a large 
red flag and is, from time to time, relieved by one of her 
companions, who bear large wreaths of big red ribbons. A 
military brass band accompanies the funerals in most cases. 
They all are “without benefit of clergy.” 

As a rule, a funeral procession would not be more than 
four ranks wide, keeping to the right side of the street. There 
was one exception, when an enormous crowd, numbering 
several thousand people and filling irregularly the entire street, 
followed the coffin of a woman. She had been a doctor and 
was killed by the mother of a little patient whose life she had 
failed to save. 

Sometimes soldiers marched by, usually without rifles, 


94 


SOCIAL CUSTOMS AND CITY LIFE 


singing. Besides the regular troops, there could be seen, in 
groups of two or more, the G. P. U. men, members of the 
political police. They wore green caps, but were otherwise 
dressed in khaki, like the bulk of the army. The regular police 
service was performed by the so-called militia men, who had 
red caps. Their uniform was black, but, during the summer, 
they had white blouses. They were armed with revolvers 
and clubs. Occasionally a prisoner was escorted between two 
policemen, one behind him and one ahead of him. Each 
policeman carried a revolver in his hand, with the finger on 
the trigger. Many prisoners could be seen as they were being 
taken to the station in cabs by the police, usually for drunken¬ 
ness. Often the policeman stood on the running board of 
the cab. 

The crowds which passed our windows were very dense in 
the hour after working time. Once two athletes passed 
carrying a football, and, for some inexplicable reason, they 
laid it down on the sidewalk. Immediately, the crowd 
scattered and moved at high speed away from the football, 
which they had taken for a bomb. 

While strolling along the Sumskaya or the Muskovskaya, 
I watched the innumerable peddlers who were the only private 
business men I saw in Russia. The selling of cigarettes was 
their main trade, but they also sold shoe-strings, cakes, fruit, 
and flowers. There were many bootblacks advertising their 
services vociferously. Many members of the former ruling 
class in Russia are said to be bootblacks now. 


95 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


The street wear of most young boys and some young girls 
was nothing but little trunks and sandals, a very healthy attire 
for children. As a whole, children looked happy and healthy. 
In the parks, nearly every child had a butterfly net in its 
hands. Others had botanizing cans or collected flowers. 
Still others played with toy airplanes. There was an ample 
supply of little folk, quite a strange sight to Americans, used 
to families with few children or, more often, with none. 
Russia resembles Germany in its human fertility; or, very 
likely, has the better of it. 

A somber contrast to the well-kept and well-nourished 
children of the respectable folk were the wild orphan children. 
Almost like wild animals, living on theft and garbage, begging, 
stealing, robbing, diseased, and unspeakably dirty, hardly able 
to speak, they were visible everywhere. The police chased 
them occasionally and, if a wild boy was arrested, his hands 
were held too high for him to bite his captor. Syphilis was 
very common among these outcasts, and their bite was feared 
like that of a snake. I saw one of these boys pull a comb out 
of a girl’s hair and offer it to her for fifty kopecks. She had 
only twenty kopecks and cried, but never got her comb back. 
I saw other boys dig into the pockets of strangers and run 
away with the spoils. They could run faster than anybody 
else and their bites and knife thrusts were feared by everybody. 
The authorities have tried to put them into institutions, but 
the lure of the wild life is too much for them and they run 
away at the first opportunity. They travel like migratory birds, 


96 


SOCIAL CUSTOMS AND CITY LIFE 


south in winter and north in summer, tramping and stealing 
rides on freight trains. These boys and girls are the derelicts 
of the great revolution and the civil wars. They have lost 
their parents or have become separated from them, have no 
homes, no relatives, and belong to nobody. They looked very 
dirty and wore nothing but rags, were always barefoot, and 
usually half-naked. 

Whenever we were met by Russians, we enjoyed cordial 
hospitality and a spontaneous courtesy, which was very 
pleasing. Russians are very tactful and greatly sensitive. A 
proud nation, once the biggest on earth, that has gone through 
hard experiences, first in the Great War, next in the Revolution, 
and, most of all, in the Civil War. They suspect a sentiment 
of superiority in the foreigners and are much pleased if their 
pride is respected by us. They are always very polite and 
deserve similar treatment. American manners are sometimes 
a little brusque and informal, and some adaptation to the 
environment is advisable. Whenever we saw Russians doff 
their hats, we carefully followed suit. Men greet each other 
by taking their hats off, and married women, in their own 
homes, usually receive a hand kiss from their male visitors. 

The Russian titles corresponding to our Mr., Mrs., and 
Miss have disappeared as a result of the Revolution and, for 
formal address, Citizen or Comrade is used, but also Professor, 
Doctor, and Engineer, for scientists, physicians, and technical 
experts, respectively. 

With only a limited knowledge of Russian, I usually spoke 


97 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


German; in some cases, English, and, in very few instances, 
French. There is no more French taught in Russia, nor is it 
anywhere used in public announcements for foreigners. 
German is very widely known, and one can always find a person 
who speaks it. All secondary schools teach it. English is 
taught in all Russian universities and is spreading so rapidly 
that it may sometime become the leading foreign language, 
at least among educated people. Cabmen, railroad conductors, 
streetcar conductors, vagrants, and peddlers hardly ever know 
German, but many merchants, policemen, and all doctors, 
engineers, and scientists speak German and often extremely 
well. A G. P. U. man (political police) with whom I con¬ 
versed on a train for an hour admitted that his excellent 
knowledge of German was acquired while he was a prisoner 
of war in Germany. 

We greatly admired the excellent singing of some of our 
visitors, usually without accompaniment of musical instruments. 
Singing is a national gift in Russia. Russians never whistle, 
but always sing. The soldiers marching on the street, the 
working-men, while moving heavy loads, the young people in 
the parks, any Russian crowd on any occasion, will sing and 
sing well. The singing in the churches is beautiful beyond 
description. 

Two of us went to the Delavoy Club one evening early in 
July. The club rooms were closed during summer, but the 
garden was open, where excellent food and wines were served, 
also fairly good beer. In a corner of the park stood a kiosk 


98 


SOCIAL CUSTOMS AND CITY LIFE 


where an orchestra played during the evening. It was interest¬ 
ing to watch the crowd. Delavoy Club means Commercial 
Club. It used to be a gathering place for the merchants and 
their families in bygone days. I did not know who managed 
it now. The visitors looked like professional men. These 
are called specialists in Soviet Russia, or, for short, spetz. It 
was apparently not a proletarian society that patronized this 
place. Going home, I noticed a wild boy circling around us. 
I kept him at a distance with my cane. Suddenly a policeman 
jumped out of the darkness and boxed the ears of the urchin 
in a resounding fashion. The boy fled screaming. It was 
the first time I had ever seen a policeman strike a boy, no 
matter how great the provocation had been. 

We met many people in our daily work, but social life 
developed slowly. We did not know how to start, and the 
others apparently waited to see what we would do. Most 
people lived in cramped quarters, usually several families in 
one apartment. Conditions were not favorable for calling and 
entertaining. Gradually, we had friends come for dinner and, 
by the end of our sojourn in Kharkov, we had held several 
parties in our own home. Also, some of us had been invited 
to teas in other homes. Apparently our Russian friends had 
an exaggerated idea of what Americans are accustomed to 
and feared to be unable to entertain us as they thought we 
would expect. 

In the home of one friendly couple, which consisted of one 
large room, we enjoyed dancing to a phonograph and drank 


99 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


tea and even wine. Little games were played and the company 
was entertained with simple magic tricks. 

I recall one occasion when I had to take our interpreter, 
Alexandra, along on a business call. Since we would have 
been too late for tea in the office, I suggested lunch in one 
of the public tea houses. We were seated at a small table 
when we suddenly felt something move around under our 
table. I had noticed a little red-bearded beggar crawl under 
several tables for a lost copper coin. I pretended to suspect 
a dog under the table and landed a vigorous kick. The beggar 
screamed and rolled from under the table, but was “given the 
air” by the manager of the place, in spite of loud protests. 
This beggar had the habit of entering restaurants and tea¬ 
rooms, where he dropped small copper coins under the tables 
beneath which he then crawled and received larger coins from 
the annoyed guests who wished to buy off the nuisance. 

I saw a number of athletic organizations of young men and 
young women pass under the windows of our apartment. It 
seemed that a great deal of encouragement was being given 
to physical culture and that these processions of athletes had 
two purposes. One was to take the athletes to a suitable field, 
and the other one to make propaganda for athletics among 
the population. In every public park there were athletic fields, 
and one could see young men and young women devoting 
themselves to sport. The usual attire for a young man was 
a bathing trunk, occasionally supplemented by sandals, and, 
in very rare cases, by a sport shirt. Women usually wore 


100 


SOCIAL CUSTOMS AND CITY LIFE 


similar trunks with a jersey and, in most cases, sandals or 
shoes, but sometimes they were barefoot. The girls seemed 
to be very fond of wearing a bright red kerchief on their heads, 
and I was told that, since red is the color of the Communists, 
they wished to express their communistic convictions in this 
way. Most of the young people looked very happy, very 
strong, very sunburned, and most of them had magnificent 
physiques. Little banners were carried, but the color inscrip¬ 
tions were very difficult to read. They apparently indicated 
the name of an athletic organization or possibly some political 
slogan such as “Down with Capitalism” or “Down with 
England.” 

Many groups on foot and in automobiles could be seen 
carrying army rifles. Evidently, the young communistic youths 
of Russia were being trained in marksmanship. How efficiently, 
I did not know. I saw target practice from trains, but the 
targets were set up at rather short distances, and it was 
impossible to judge the accuracy of the shooting. 

It seemed that a great deal of attention was being paid in 
Russia to personal hygiene. Not only was river bathing 
customary during a large portion of the year, but bathtubs 
and shower baths appeared to be spreading rapidly over Russia. 
I also noticed, when I looked out early in the morning from 
the window of our apartment, which was on the fourth floor, 
that in a great many houses the bedroom windows had been 
kept open during the night. I concluded that many Russians 
slept with plenty of fresh air, which was a rather new custom, 


101 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


since, even in countries like Germany and France, sleeping 
with open windows was utterly unknown thirty years ago. 

Once we watched a race of isroshtchiks on Sumskaya. 
After a wedding the bride and groom always try to escape 
from the party by hiring the best cab-driver with the fastest 
horse. The guests also get cabs with fast horses, which results 
in a horse race through the streets. There are still wonderful 
trotting horses in Russia, and it was a delightful show to see 
them step out on the hard pavement of the road. 

On a Friday evening in July we had Eta and Paula with 
us at dinner. Both girls had a room in our apartment before 
we arrived and could keep it according to housing rules. We 
often saw them carry their supper home—a herring, a 
cucumber, a roll of bread—while we sat in affluence at our 
dining table. An occasional invitation to join us was always 
politely refused, but a dinner invitation a few days ahead of 
time was gladly accepted. Both girls were modest; we liked 
and respected them. They were clerks in some government 
office at something like 30 rubles a month. Most of this 
money went into clothes. They always looked clean and well- 
kept. One of them spoke a little German; the other, only 
Russian. The conversation was therefore rather slow. They 
were always cheerful and told us about their friends, Sunday 
excursions, and whatever else their narrow lives contained. 
We noticed that they had frequent visits from young men with 
whom they went swimming or dancing. 

I had expressed the desire to see the market where the 


102 


SOCIAL CUSTOMS AND CITY LIFE 


peasants and small tradespeople sold their products and second¬ 
hand goods. Anna Alexeyevna, my teacher of Russian, 
invited me to join her when she went marketing on a Sunday. 
The market was held in a big square where many hundreds 
of little booths were set up for a few hours. All kinds of farm 
products from eggs to flowers were on sale; also kerchiefs, 
boots, clothes, tools, furs, small machinery, and spare parts. 
Probably several thousand people crowded around bargaining, 
talking, singing, gossiping. There were city folk and country 
folk, working-men and, more often, working-men’s wives, 
children, beggars, and priests. The crowd was more interesting 
than the stuff that they sold or bought. After Anna 
Alexeyevna had bought a chicken, some eggs, butter, and 
bread, and I had invested sixty kopecks in a bouquet for her, 
we went home. 

In the afternoon we took the street car to the State Park, 
which lies on the Sumskaya at the edge of the city. 

There is a small admission fee to all large public parks and, 
in return, the visitor gets music, various shows, and athletic 
games. There must be some free admissions, because we saw 
wild children, beggars, and gypsies among the public, none 
of whom could possess the thirty kopecks which we paid. 
Some of these people I noticed continuously chewed sunflower 
seeds, which seem to be a delicacy for poor people in Russia. 
Each beggar seemed to have the monopoly of a section of the 
park. There was a primitive stage with a still more primitive 
play, in which a school teacher, some bad boys, and a fairy 


103 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


appeared. We left the play and walked to an orchestra. Near 
it we stretched ourselves on the grass, very much to the grief 
of the park policeman. He appeared before us every half-hour 
and implored us to leave the grass. We sadly shook our 
heads and pretended profound ignorance of the language and 
Russian laws. 

In a section of the park was an athletic field on which a 
girl’s team did track work. Beyond were dense woods and 
meadows with people strolling about—a quiet picture of 
harmless pleasure. 

One evening my American friends and I were invited to 
visit Anna Alexeyevna, my teacher of Russian. It was her 
birthday. We brought her some little presents and, in her 
joy, she asked her husband, “May I kiss them?” We all 
received a hearty kiss from her. We sat down to a couple of 
bottles of excellent Russian champagne from the Crimean 
peninsula. Little social games, also magic tricks, were produced 
by a Russian visitor, who made a cane stand straight, let a 
silver ruble drop through a glass on the table, and did numerous 
things like that, as they were done in central Europe fifty or 
a hundred years ago. We even danced in the one-room 
apartment to the tunes of a small phonograph and went home 
after a very pleasant evening. 

In Kharkov I saw many Russian soldiers alone and in 
military formations, but I never saw them carry lances. The 
cavalry of the Red Army wear rifles and sabres. The infantry 
has a bayonet fixed on the rifle more or less permanently. All 


104 


SOCIAL CUSTOMS AND CITY LIFE 


uniforms are khaki and officers are hardly distinguishable from 
the enlisted men, especially when with the men. The pro¬ 
letarian character is always in evidence. But when I saw 
officers in the evening in a restaurant, they looked smart in 
their white fatigue uniforms, with well groomed mustaches. 

From the windows of the train I could see an encampment 
with rows of modern field guns in front, also not very far away 
a rifle range. 

Numerous civilian rifle clubs consisting of boys and girls 
could be met in the trains and on the streets. Once I talked 
with a Russian in a train and inquired about one of these clubs. 
He smiled and said, “They promenade, they drink, and they 
kiss.” Well, that might also happen, but, unquestionably, the 
young people in the U. S. S. R. are interested in rifle practice. 

I had a discussion with a communist as to whether the 
Russian word Torarishtch which means “Comrade” should be 
rendered in German by Genosse, which was the old German 
form of address among socialists, or by Kamerad , which is a 
more military expression. Usually, I was addressed as 
“Kamerad” by German-speaking communists. If they did 
not know exactly how to address me, they called me “Professor,” 
thinking it to be the most harmless and inoffensive form of 
address. 

One Saturday in July I saw a Mayerhold play, Trust D. E. 
or Trust for the Destruction of Europe. Its plot is this: 
An American millionaire is bored and advertises for business 
propositions which will give him something to do. Various 


105 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


people see him and one gives him what he wants—the idea 
of a gigantic corporation for the destruction of Europe. 

The Trust for the Destruction of Europe is formed with 
president, vice president, and directors, and its program is to 
destroy one country after another with bombs from airplanes. 
At first, England is attacked. The scene shows the House 
of Lords in despair. There is famine in England, and the 
noble lords decide to eat one of their members. He is carried 
out, and soon a kettle with soup meat and bones is brought 
in, and the contents are devoured with gusto by the hungry 
lords. A map of Europe is thrown on the scene, and England 
is scratched out on it. 

The next countries to suffer are France, Italy, Germany, and 
Poland. A scene is laid in each one, characterizing, or rather 
satirizing, its social conditions in an amusing way, and always 
the map of Europe appears with a new country eliminated. 
Polish society, clergy, and above all Marshal Pilsudski, are 
shown up in a very clever fashion. Finally, the Trust decides 
to destroy the Soviet Republic. But the proletariat of the 
U. S. S. R. has prepared for its defense. A tunnel has been 
dug from Leningrad to New York under the Baltic Sea and 
the Atlantic Ocean. The progress in the tunneling work is 
indicated by an advancing line on a map. Just when the 
Trust for the Destruction of Europe is ready to act against 
the Soviet Union, the tunnel is finished, the Red Army appears 
in New York, and the members of the Trust are arrested 
amid the riotous applause of the audience. 


106 


SOCIAL CUSTOMS AND CITY LIFE 


Less political were the shows on variety stages and in concert 
halls. They were musical farces or excellent concerts. Leading 
orchestras from Moscow and Leningrad played remarkably 
good music. The musicians sometimes wore evening clothes 
with tan-colored shoes, and sometimes wore street clothes, but 
their performances were never to be forgotten. The prices for 
concerts were from 25 kopecks to 2 rubles, according to seats. 

Even the ordinary garden concerts were exquisitely good and 
also well attended. The Russians love music and the theatre, 
and a certain prosperity among the population is apparent to 
anyone who looks at the full theatres and concert halls. 

Then, too, there were all kinds of theatrical shows in the 
public parks and in beer gardens, usually with excellent acting. 
Several of us got into a show once where the admission price 
was 10 kopecks (5 cents). The stage setting was primitive, 
but the acting good. A great many of these plays were 
tragedies. The end was not always happy as in the movie 
dramas of America. 

The observation of a few small matters helps considerably 
in getting along in Russia, as well as in other continental 
countries. There is, for instance, the question of when to 
doff one’s hat. Americans are very indifferent in this matter, 
but Europeans see in it a grave problem of courtesy. A 
Russian would never keep his hat on in an office. He even 
is accustomed to uncover himself when entering a store. He 
doffs his hat to a man to whom he wishes to speak on the 
street. Not to observe these rules is, in Europe, frequently 


107 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 

taken for an intentional insult, although Europeans are becom¬ 
ing gradually familiar with American manners. They begin 
to understand them but do not necessarily approve of them. 
It pays to watch the habits and customs of a country in which 
we want to do business. 

In Russia, as in any continental country, a man greets the 
woman first. No woman would speak to a man first, as in 
America or England. It is therefore very necessary to doff 
one’s hat to any Russian woman to whom one has been 
introduced. 

In handshaking, as in America, it is good taste not to offer 
one’s hand to a woman until she has extended hers. Also, a 
younger man waits until an older man extends his hand first, 
but the younger man greets the older one first. 

Social contacts, as I have said, developed slowly outside of 
the office. The Russian engineers hesistated to invite us to 
their homes because they thought Americans were used to a 
very much greater hospitality than they could offer in their 
present circumstances. There was a considerable reserve to 
overcome on our part until personal relations became cordial 
from home to home. But whenever we succeeded in establish¬ 
ing them, they were extremely charming. Russians are the 
most delightful people socially. They are very tactful, very 
considerate, and extremely polite. 


108 



Chapter VIII 

INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT AND 
FOREIGN RELATIONS 


R USSIA is building its industries up with the help of 
* foreign technical assistance, mainly American and 
German. According to my own observations it is necessary 
to obtain not only the personal respect of the Russians, but 
also their friendship and good will. To do this, one must 
treat them on the basis of their own politeness, must show 
interest in their institutions, ways of living, and economic and 
social problems. I found that they appreciate it if a foreigner 
tries to learn their language. I admit this is easier said than 
done. The Germans have a certain advantage in having 
always been close neighbors to the Russians and being more 
familiar with their manners and ways. If America wants to 
obtain and keep the major portion of Russia’s import business, 


109 




GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


she will have to pay attention to Russian literature, Russian 
economics, and Russian social life. Also, young men who 
desire employment in Russia must make it a point to acquire 
at least a reading knowledge of Russian. If they get it, the 
ability to understand and use the spoken word will soon follow. 

An engineer from the Hydrographic Bureau called on us 
one day. He was in charge of ground-water and river studies 
in a section of the Ukraine and asked me for advice on 
American books on his subject. I suggested that he should 
write to the Chief of the Water-Resource Section of the U. S. 
Geological Survey in Washington; I also promised to send 
him some literature after my return to the United States. 
My visitor showed me plans of river regulations which he 
had carried out, and we discussed the great water power 
station at Dnyeprostroy in the Ukraine, the greatest power sta¬ 
tion in the world. It is being constructed under the direction of 
American engineers, and the Russians seem to be well pleased 
with the work. A German firm had bids on this project but 
lost out against the Americans. The same German firm was 
later awarded the construction of another large project in 
northern Russia. 

Before the war, America was little known in Russia, and 
Germany represented to the Russian mind the symbol of 
efficient labor, promptness, and accuracy. She is now second 
in the opinion of the Russians but still holds a place of respect 
and, to a certain extent, of affection. She is the only power 
in Europe that the Russians do not distrust, and with which 


110 


INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT 


they have a sort of neutrality agreement, a somewhat veiled 
alliance. But there are many disappointments on both sides. 
Germany once expected to build herself up economically by 
access to the Russian resources, but she did not get as much 
business, or quite as satisfactory terms as she expected. Many 
great industrial companies have had unfortunate experiences 
in Russia; they spent much money there on concessions, but 
made only small profits. On the other hand, Russia had 
expected that Germany would become more radically socialistic 
than she ultimately turned out to be. Nevertheless, the relations 
between German consuls and the local authorities seemed to 
be very good. The German officials, as a rule, speak Russian 
very well. On the German national holiday, the 11th of 
August, the anniversary of the proclamation of the Weimar 
constitution, all of the leading government officials of Kharkov 
paid their respects to the German consul general. There was 
a second reception in the evening to which I was invited. 
There I met the Polish consul general, who spoke excellent 
German. 

Often the German consul general could be seen riding in 
his Russian carriage, which was driven by a regular old- 
fashioned Russian driver. It was the only cab in Kharkov 
which looked elegant, and the driver had a new caftan and 
a new top hat. The German consulate was well appointed 
with excellent furniture and rugs in old Russian style, and 
was probably the only house of its type in Kharkov. The 
consul general’s wife had been a Princess Galitzina, a very 


111 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


beautiful woman. She had been dead for a year when I made 
the acquaintance of the consul general. The latter spoke 
Russian as well as he did his native tongue and was a highly 
respected person in the town. The consulate was always 
locked. Any visitor had to pass a very soldierlike Russian 
doorkeeper, who also seemed reminiscent of prerevolutionary 
Russia. 

Occasionally, I saw German technicians and experts in 
various lines. It seems there are a few German military and 
naval instructors in Russia, but no large number of German 
officers found employment in the army and navy of the 

U. S. S. R. 

I heard of many young Russians who are sent as students 
to Germany to study in technical schools and universities. 
Apparently a good deal of German social welfare work has 
been copied in Russia. German is taught in all secondary 
schools in Russia, and I had a German reader used by Russian 
pupils in my hand. It contained stories about communism 
and the revolution. This typically modern Russian reading 
material looked quite strange in the German language. 

On August 30, our plans for the new mine 16-bis at 
Krindachevka and our revision of the plans for the Amerikanka 
were submitted to a technical board on which were assembled 
the highest authorities in mining engineering in Russia, repre¬ 
sentatives of the Supreme Council of Economy of the U. S. 
S. R., and the Chief Engineers of the Donugol and Yugostal. 

Many other engineers were among the spectators. I knew 


112 


INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT 


every one personally and made a silent census of their 
linguistic training. Of the twenty-two Russian engineers who 
were in the room at one time, everybody knew German, two 
of them knew English, and two others, French. I believe that 
these proportions hold in a general sense for all educated people 
in Russia, according to my observations. Nearly all of them 
can speak German, some, English in increasing numbers, and 
some, French in decreasing numbers. The French language 
has officially ceased to exist in Russia. It is no longer taught, 
and wherever announcements, advertisements, and notices are 
posted in a foreign language, French is omitted. It is of no 
more help to a traveler in Russia than would be Italian or 
Spanish. German is taught in all secondary schools, and 
English in all institutions of higher education. German is 
stationary, English is gaining, and French, disappearing. The 
main reason for the enthusiasm for English is the interest in 
American technique and commerce. 

When I was in Germany, before entering the U. S. S. R., 
I presented many questions about Russia to industrialists doing 
business with Russia to fellow travelers and to clerks in travel 
bureaus. Nobody seemed well informed. On the return trip 
I talked with a variety of people in the railroad compartments, 
in sleeping cars, in hotels, and elsewhere, and nobody seemed 
to know anything about Russia. In Russia itself, I had many 
occasions to discuss not only America, but Western Europe in 
general, with Russians who had never been abroad. There 
was an astonishing lack of information. European newspapers 


113 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


print much information about Russia, more than the average 
American newspaper, but even this news is meager, and what 
the Russian papers say about foreign countries is highly colored 
from a communistic point of view. There seems to be an 
invisible, but very real, Chinese wall around Russia, and scarce 
is the news that penetrates it either way. A very inaccurate 
opinion forms itself on either side of the great divide, and 
nothing is more amenable to propaganda than ignorance. The 
best soil for propaganda is “ignorance, led by artificially 
aroused emotions.” Of course, there must be something on 
which the emotions can start—a different political, social, 
religious outlook, a shocking event, some concrete act of 
injustice in the eyes of the party that is to be the victim of 
propaganda. 

The Great War is still fresh in our memory. There was 
a pro-German and an anti-German propaganda and the latter 
was greatly superior to the former. The American public 
was constantly reminded of real or imaginary outrages of 
German militarism, German autocracy, and German designs 
of world conquest. It was easy to do this, because a foundation 
existed in the traditional prejudice against compulsory military 
service and the autocratic rule of the drillmaster, from which 
many a German youth had fled in bygone days to America. 
Some Americans had been rebuked in Germany by policemen 
for infringing a rule with which they were unfamiliar or which 
they did not care to observe. I heard in former years, long 
before the war, occasional allusions to Austrian acts of violence 


114 


INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT 


in Italy or Hungary, which happened in 1848 or earlier. I 
never indulged in an argument against accusations of this sort 
and rather felt amused because I attributed them to a feeling 
of republican righteousness against a monarchy and thought 
these notions to be very harmless—not worth contradiction. 
Little did I think at that time that public opinion would be 
swayed in a great crisis by all these slumbering prejudices. 
They even hovered over the treaty-makers at Versailles. 

The same situation is now evident in regard to Russia. The 
ancient lie about “nationalization of women” still lingers in 
the background of some people’s minds, and fresh horrible 
reports about the persecution of all religion, about world revo¬ 
lution, and many other unpleasant things are fertile ground 
for anti-Russian propaganda. I cannot help feeling that the 
same machinery, which so successfully engineered the anti- 
German propaganda, is again at work to prepare the future 
neutrals for a campaign against the U. S. S. R. That campaign 
may never come, just as the Great War might have been avoided 
with more honesty, good will, skill, and statesmanship in high 
quarters. There were many wars during the nineteenth century 
which might have been, but which were averted; for instance, 
an Anglo-Russian war in 1878; an Anglo-French war at the 
time of the Fashoda incident; and again, an Anglo-Russian 
war at the time when Roshdestvensky’s fleet bombarded English 
fisher-boats on the Dogger Bank; not to mention several Franco- 
German and Austro-Russian potential wars which were in 
the air at various times. 


115 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


A better mutual understanding, unbiased by propaganda, 
between Russia and Western Europe, especially between Russia 
and England, would be the best preventive of future conflicts. 

The propaganda against England was often very ingenious. 
One afternoon I noticed a crowd standing around a man in 
uniform on Sumskaya. The man wore a tropical helmet, a 
red coat, and black trousers, with a big saber at his side. He 
looked just like a British officer who had stepped out of a 
Russian funny paper. He insulted the public and made a 
fool of himself in general. A Russian mob looked at him 
with a mixture of curiosity and contempt, but nobody harmed 
him. I only heard the exclamation “Anglichanin,” which 
means “Englishman” in Russian. It is unnecessary to say 
that the pseudo-officer was an actor from one of the Kharkov 
theatres. After a while he ordered a cab and drove away, 
perhaps to a different part of the town where he repeated his 
performance. I am sure that he covered all of Kharkov in a 
few days, leaving everywhere he went a crowd that was 
thoroughly disgusted with England. 

There were many military airplanes near Kharkov, which 
is probably a center for a possible mobilization against Poland. 
There were numerous soldiers visible on both sides of the 
Russian-Polish border. It is one of the new military frontiers 
which the peace-makers at Versailles have provided in their 
zeal to end wars. This frontier is very likely to be a “theatre 
of war” in the next unpleasantness that may befall Europe. 
In place of the old Norwegian-Russian, Swedish-Russian, 


116 



/ was tagged by a pretty girl—the ribbon read: “For the 
Brea\-with-England’Airplane-Squadron” 


117 





















































INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT 


German-Russian, Austrian-Russian, and Roumanian-Russian 
frontiers, which ran from the Baltic to the Black Sea, there are 
now a Finnish-Russian, a Polish-Russian, a Roumanian-Russian, 
an Esthonian-Russian, a Lettic-Russian, and a Lithuanian- 
Russian frontier, besides the numerous frontiers which the new 
border-states form between themselves and Germany, Czecho¬ 
slovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. Every old chance for 
a war in these parts of Europe has been replaced by two or 
more. On all these new frontiers, governments are busy 
drilling their soldiers. But the most powerful of all these 
new armies is the Red Army of the U. S. S. R., although it 
may be a good deal less strong than the old Russian army of 
1914. The Russian soldiers think, so I was told, that no 
enemy troops will fight against the red flag, but will desert 
to go over to the communistic Red Army. 

On the last day of August, I was tagged by a pretty girl 
who asked for ten kopecks and stuck a red ribbon on my coat 
lapel. When I got home, I read the inscription of the ribbon: 
“For the Break-with-England-Airplane-Squadron.” 

There is no question that an Anglo-Russian war is much 
in the air. Everybody in Russia feels it, and many moves of 
the British government in Asia give us the impression that 
English diplomacy is very much aware of the dangers of the 
situation. At every step, one meets hatred and fear of England, 
but not of individual Englishmen in Russia. The hatred 
against Poland is perhaps not quite so great, but it extends to 
the Poles individually. 


119 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


In 1927, all men, women, and children in Leningrad were 
supplied with gas masks, because every moment an English 
air raid was expected, with plenty of gas bomb throwing. 
Undoubtedly, nobody in England ever had such intentions, 
but they were very real in the minds of the Russian people. 

Everywhere, I saw anti-British propaganda—in the streets, 
in the theatre, in the press, on posters, and in speeches and 
demonstrations. Austin Chamberlain appeared in effigy on 
all possible occasions. He was even used as a target on the 
rifle ranges, with his monocle serving as a bull’s eye. 

A war between England and Russia would involve a large 
portion of the world, not merely because the U. S. S. R. 
forms one-sixth of the inhabited earth and the British empire 
another sixth, but Poland, Roumania, and the Baltic nations 
would very likely be drawn into the fray, and very probably 
also Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, China, and Japan. The 
Japanese statesman, Marquis Ito, once prophesied there would 
be a great war in Europe and another, later, in the Orient. 
Perhaps he will be right in the second case, as he was in the first. 

It would be very expensive for England to fight Russia in 
the Baltic, in the Black Sea, in Afghanistan, in China, in 
Mongolia, and in East Siberia. She could never make the 
war pay, less even than the Boer War and the Great War. 
Also, it is questionable whether all of her dominions and 
colonies would again sacrifice men and money so willingly. 

Russia needs peace still more than England. Both have a 
good reason to prefer peace, but both may consider the war 


120 


INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT 


“inevitable.” So thought Germany and Austria with regard 
to Russia in 1914, and the most unnecessary and superfluous 
war in history resulted. It is even now impossible to under¬ 
stand why Russia and the Central Powers fought each other. 
I asked every Russian with whom I have become acquainted 
about this point, and not one could answer the question. 

On September 1, just before I left Kharkov, I saw hundreds 
of communistic young people’s organizations march by under 
our windows. The thousands who formed the procession 
seemed to express one thought and one will. I wondered if 
they would always think as they did then. 


121 



Chapter IX 

RELIGION AND MORALITY 


C HURCH bells began ringing early in the morning and 
kept on ringing for a long time; so it was rather hard 
to take a morning nap on a Sunday in town. After breakfast, 
one Sunday in July, I took a little stroll and made a round 
of several churches. There were numerous Ukrainian and 
Russian churches in Kharkov. The services in all of them 
were very ornate, with the rich ritual and the priest wearing 
a golden crown. There was no organ music, but magnificent 
singing by professional singers. There were no benches; the 
audience had to stand or kneel. There was much bending of 
knees and making of crosses. The Russians cross themselves, 
first from forehead to chest and then from the right shoulder 
to the left, while western Catholics cross themselves from 
forehead to chest and from the left shoulder to the right. 


122 









RELIGION AND MORALITY 


I also visited a Polish Catholic Church. It was a very hot 
place and the church was overloaded with decorations. It 
looked quite different from a Catholic church in Western 
Europe or America. From there, I went to the German 
Lutheran Church and rested in the big, cool place, which had 
only a small number of people in attendance. The service 
was held in German and consisted of readings from the Bible, 
hymns, and a sermon. The minister was a German, who had 
been called to Kharkov by the Lutherans. On the tower of 
the church one could read the inscription: Eine feste Burg ist 
unser Gott . 

On another Sunday, we visited some of the many Russian 
and Ukrainian churches and enjoyed their exquisite singing. 
The Nikolas Church on the Nikolaevskaya Square, a structure 
in the Russian Byzantine style, looked very beautiful. It was 
built at the end of the seventeenth century. 

I saw the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of Kharkov drive to 
church in a cab. The once pompous prelate looked very seedy, 
his priests everywhere looked still more seedy. The archbishop, 
by the way, was born in Saxony, and spoke German with a 
Saxon accent. 

Everything about a Russian church had an Asiatic appear¬ 
ance—its pomp, its complicated and unintelligible ritual, its 
dull-looking clergy. The Greek Orthodox Church is a 
backward member of the circle of Christian churches. It has 
fallen behind since the schism of the eighteenth century, when 
the Patriarch of Constantinople broke with the Pope of Rome. 


123 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


Since that time, not only two different religions, but two 
very distinct civilizations have developed in Europe. Eastern 
Europe was influenced by Constantinople; Western Europe by 
Rome. The boundary line between east and west ran between 
the Baltic countries, Poland, Hungary, and Croatia on the 
western side, and Russia, Roumania, and Serbia on the eastern 
side, starting at the Arctic ocean and ending at the Adriatic 
Sea. There is no greater divide in religion, civilization, and 
culture anywhere in Europe. The Greek Orthodox East always 
lagged behind the Catholic and, later, partly Protestant West. 
On the western side of the line the ruling countries for many 
years were Sweden, Poland, and Austria; on the eastern, 
Russia and Turkey. It is one of the tragedies of the World 
War that part of the east-west line was blotted out when 
Croatia became a dependency of a formerly Turkish Serbia, 
and part of Hungary fell a spoil to another recently Turkish 
pashalik —Roumania. But, in justice to the Versailles treaty, 
it must be said that it did not return the Baltic states and 
Poland to Russia. After their conquest by Germany, it made 
them independent. 

The ministers of the Greek Church can be easily recognized 
anywhere because of their clerical robes. They wear long 
cassocks and usually a tall, rimless headgear, below which the 
long hair and heavily bearded faces remind us of illustrations 
in old Bibles. I suspected that a good many of the beggars who 
clustered around the Russian churches had formerly been priests. 

My impression was that the Russian Church had collapsed 


124 


RELIGION AND MORALITY 


completely and absolutely in its collision with communism; and 
it must have been pretty ripe for the debacle or it would not have 
shown itself to be so weak. It was an institution bound up in 
ceremonies and litanies, without the spiritual force which gave 
the Roman Catholic Church its triumph over the powers of the 
revolution in central Europe and which has made the Papacy 
more powerful now than it was fifteen or twenty years ago. 

About the middle of August, I spent a delightful evening 
in an old Russian home and discussed the subject of morality 
with my hosts. Much is said outside of Russia about the 
complete collapse of the family in Soviet Russia. Nothing of 
that was visible to me. On the contrary, I was much impressed 
by the solidity of the family life and the seriousness with which 
matrimonial bonds were looked upon. There is no more reason 
to judge Russian family morals by the wild reports which 
circulate abroad about Russia than to draw final conclusions 
about American marriage from the divorce stories with which 
the European press entertains its readers. Modern Russian 
laws make marriage and divorce very easy, but I never met 
anybody in Russia who had been divorced, just as I also never 
met anybody in America who had been in Reno or Paris for 
that purpose. The sensational gets the front page in the 
newspapers, but it is very much the exception in actual life. 

One frequently hears about mixed bathing in Russia. It 
is perfectly true, but it is done with a great deal of propriety. 
When I was riding to my quarters in the field, our carriage 
frequently passed by ponds in which girls went bathing on 


125 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


one side and boys on the other, all without any swimming 
apparel, but they would not stare at one another, nor would 
they approach each other, except in the water which was so 
muddy as to act as a screen. In the streams one would see 
men and women separated by a distance of one to two hundred 
yards, in plain daylight, but the features became indistinguish¬ 
able at such a distance. Our boat would sometimes go through 
crowds of bathing naiads, who stood up to the waist in the 
water, or who lowered themselves into the water as we 
approached. If the boat was a hundred yards from the 
shore, some girls would climb on the shore and wave their 
hands to us. There was a feeling of perfect security, and, as 
I have said, a distance of about one hundred yards was sufficient 
to satisfy the requirements of Russian proprieties. 

The Russian people, like the people of central Europe, have 
a notion of physical culture which takes pride in the beauties 
of the body, exposing it to the sun and air and the occasional 
looks of persons of the other sex. This is done without any 
intention of sex appeal, but purely with a certain naive enjoy¬ 
ment of light, air, and beauty. It never gives the impression 
of indecency and since everything along this line is a matter 
of custom and habits, it is impossible to draw any conclusion 
of lower moral standards in Russia. Anybody who has 
experienced the metamorphosis of the American lady’s bathing 
suit during the last twenty-five years must conclude that the 
Russians are merely a little bit further ahead of us, and that 
we may catch up with them in time. 


126 



Chapter X 

OBSERVATIONS OF COUNTRY LIFE 


O N Saturday, August 6th, I took a trip to Smiev, which 
is located on the Donetz River. I had to ride for an 
hour on the train and then rented a lineykd. There were a 
number of lineykds on the road, and, since the coachmen paid 
no attention to the horses, they soon moved at very close quar¬ 
ters, and the persons sitting at the rear end of the car were 
likely to be touched by the heads of the horses from the car 
behind. This, however, did not bother the drivers at all. 
If one wanted to stop for some reason, one said “stoy :the 
horse heard it before the driver acted, and stood still. 

Before going to Smiev I had supplied myself with food, 


127 






GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


such as cheese, caviar, ham, wine, and bread. In the village 
my three American friends and I met some Russian friends 
and we spent the day together, largely rowing in boats on the 
Donetz River, also swimming. The day passed very quickly. 

The cabman had been asked when the next train would go 
back to Kharkov. He assured us that it was to go at nine 
o’clock, and he was asked to show up in the village in plenty 
of time so that we might be at the station at a quarter of nine. 
The buying of tickets in a Russian railroad station is a com¬ 
plicated affair, but, in a small station, I expected that there 
would be no difficulty. 

When we arrived at the station building a quarter before 
nine, and noticed that there were no other cabs waiting outside, 
we became suspicious. Going into the station, I found the 
ticket office closed, although, according to Russian rules, it 
should have been opened an hour before the train was to leave. 
The manager of the station restaurant assured me there was 
no train until six next morning. We faced the possibility of 
having to spend the night waiting in the station. It would 
not even have been possible to stretch out on a bench, because 
all the benches in the station were occupied by loafers, who 
were sleeping on them, as well as on the floor, or tables, and 
everywhere. A Russian railroad station is always filled with 
sleeping people, who go there without any idea of when the 
train will leave, but merely wait for a chance to travel. If 
they miss the train, they wait for another one, and sometimes 
they may spend a week at the station. They always bring 


128 


OBSERVATIONS OF COUNTRY LIFE 


food along and spend most of their waiting time asleep. I 
suppose they miss a great many trains because they are asleep 
when the train is called. It was no agreeable prospect for us 
to spend a whole night in these quarters, of which the least 
that could be said was that the atmosphere was heavily laden 
with odors of every possible description. 

About ten minutes before ten a young man, who had heard 
me inquire for a train, suddenly appeared and told me that a 
train would pass through the station for Kharkov in ten 
minutes. Apparently, the train came from nowhere and no¬ 
body knew anything about it until the last station had sig¬ 
nalled its approach. I rushed to the ticket office, found it 
open, bought four tickets, and we waited on the platform for 
this unexpected godsend. On the platform I met a Russian 
engineer with his wife, both of whom spoke German, and we 
chatted until the train came, and went together into a com¬ 
partment with so-called hard seats, but infinitely better to 
sit upon for an hour than the seats in the station, where our 
sojourn would have been for a whole night. 

When we arrived in Kharkov, we engaged two cabs to drive 
us to our apartment. I had bargained for the fare with the 
first driver, who agreed to drive us for one ruble, fifty kopecks. 
My companions in the second car had made no arrangement; 
consequently, when I paid both drivers at our destination, the 
driver of the second car insisted upon two rubles, especially 
since I had given him a bank note for two rubles, asking for 
change of fifty kopecks. However, instead of driving away 


129 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


with his two rubles, he stopped and argued, and finally agreed 
to return fifty kopecks. 

I was especially impressed by the vegetation along the Donetz 
River. It was full of enormous willows, many of which had 
magnificent clusters of mistletoe. The river itself was not very 
wide, could easily be navigated by boat, and was very slow, 
and, at the place where we bathed, it was easy to swim across it. 
There were some very old-looking fishermen fishing in it. The 
river appeared very muddy. A great many people were bath¬ 
ing, and we had to row our boat occasionally through groups 
of bathers of both sexes, who were not in the least disturbed 
by our approach. 

Apparently Smiev is a popular country resort for city people 
from Kharkov, who come out for week-ends and for their 
entire vacation. It is a lovely place with primitive accommo¬ 
dations—no hotel. Therefore, the visitors either have to bring 
their food along and cook it for themselves or partake of the 
very simple fare of the inhabitants of the village. 

By looking out of the window of the room in which our 
Russian friends lived, we saw a strange group pass by. It 
consisted of boys whose clothing was either very much reduced 
or absent, but who marched in a procession toward the river. 
We were informed that this was the Swimming Club of Smiev. 

At Smiev, I heard a delightful little story. It is a good 
hunting place for ducks. The old game law was based on 
the breeding season of the ducks and the dates were marked 
on the Julian calendar, which was thirteen days behind the 


130 


OBSERVATIONS OF COUNTRY LIFE 


western dates. When the Gregorian calendar was adopted, 
the new game laws kept the same dates on the new calendar, 
and the ducks were supposed to rearrange their domestic re¬ 
lations. 

The following week-end we started out on another trip, since 
Monday was to be a Russian holiday and we could stay away 
from our offices for two days. Two of my American friends 
joined me in a journey to Khorov on the Donetz River, and 
two Russian friends came with us. We met the daughter of 
one of them in Smiev and brought her along to Khorov. We 
supplied ourselves again with plenty of wine, cheese, caviar, 
bread, candy, and cigarettes. The tickets were bought for 
Smiev; from there, the long trip in lineykcts was begun. Before 
getting to Khorov, we had to cross the Donetz. We noticed 
a ferry on the river, but without a ferryman. Besides, the 
ferry happened to be on the other side of the river. 

Apparently, if you chance to meet the ferry on the right side, 
you go across, provided you pull it over yourself, whereas if the 
ferry is on the other side, you have to wait until luck brings a 
traveler who is moving the opposite direction from you and 
who will have to bring the ferry across. Our cab drivers 
expected it would take a long time before we could get the 
ferry. They unharnessed their horses, fed them, and settled 
down to a rest of several hours. Fortunately, a man on the 
other side of the river noticed our situation and brought the 
ferry across. He was in his vacation costume, which con¬ 
sisted of a pair of sandals and bathing trunks. Later, I noticed 


131 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


when he went bathing that he carefully took the trunks off, 
to keep them dry, and hung them up in a tree. It was a warm 
day, and a number of parties went into the river, among whom 
were a great many women. 

I had a peculiar experience there because I had brought 
along a swimming suit, and, when I went into the river in the 
swimming suit, the entire village of Khorkov turned out to 
see the fool who went into the water in his clothes. It was 
considered the proper thing to go bathing without a stitch of 
clothing, while to wear a bathing suit was an unheard-of, un¬ 
believable, and a highly strange procedure, which aroused the 
utmost attention and, probably, also disapproval, but, since 
the Russians are a very polite and friendly people, I was not 
made to feel the impropriety of my action. This incident 
merely showed me how relative are our conceptions of the 
proprieties and that what may be the proper thing in one coun¬ 
try is most improper in another. 

In our two days’ wandering around Khorov, I noticed a 
pretty country house, which belonged to a forester, who lived 
there with his family, consisting of wife, four children, and 
mother-in-law. They had a beautiful garden around the house, 
and I admired many of the southern Russian plants, trees, and 
shrubs which they raised. One delightful picture was to see 
the maid feed the geese, or the grandmother go out with the 
children. This forester had several dogs, one of which looked 
rather fierce; so, while we were in Khorov, we carried a piece 
of bread in our pocket to throw to the fierce dog whenever we 


132 


OBSERVATIONS OF COUNTRY LIFE 


had to pass the forester’s house, as an insurance against be¬ 
ing attacked. 

After a day of traveling, swimming, and boating, we looked 
for quarters to spend the night. My two American friends 
and I selected a barn where we could sleep in the hay, while 
our Russian friends stayed in a house. 

Sleeping in bams was nothing unusual for me, since I have 
done it a great many times in America on geological trips; 
so I was very content to lie down in the hay after I had spread 
a raincoat along under me, but I was careful to select a place 
which was none too close to the door of the barn. One of 
my friends, who had never slept in a barn before, thought 
that the neighborhood of the door would be most desirable 
on account of the fresh air. It happened that when we awoke 
the next morning, the person who slept nearest to the door 
had been bitten badly by mosquitoes, which had not penetrated 
to my distant corner. However, I had drawn another com¬ 
panion in the form of a dog that rolled up against my feet 
and presented me with a few of his fleas. 

In the morning we took a long stroll on the banks of the 
Donetz, climbing up some of the hills that overlooked the land¬ 
scape. There were magnificent prairies, woods, and fields, 
through which the slow river was meandering. The autumn 
flora was beginning, as the asters and the sunflowers were blos¬ 
soming, as well as the many-colored small flowers of the steppe. 

For breakfast, we went to one of the farmhouses and later 
ate the lunch we had brought from Kharkov. It was a beautiful, 


133 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


quiet, restful day—a Ukrainian summer day, none too hot 
and yet warm enough; no wind and no rain; and the air was 
filled with the odor of flowers and trees. 

When we looked at the stream, we saw a group of hunters, 
who had been hunting ducks, pass by. They talked with loud 
voices and fired a gun in order to attract the attention of a boat¬ 
man, whom they requested to take them across. There was a 
perfect cheerfulness among the people whom we saw. Every¬ 
body seemed to get as much enjoyment out of their day of 
rest as they could and to forget all worries of Russian life for 
a few days. 

Our cabs arrived in the afternoon to take us to Smiev, which 
was reached after several hours’ driving, and it was with sincere 
regret that we entered the train, which was there on time at 
nine o’clock, in order to go back to the city. 

On my last week-end trip, I saw more of the peasants than 
before and was deeply impressed. Everyone who thinks of 
Russia has in mind the nearly 150 millions of peasant folk, 
that amorphous, voiceless mass which forms the bulk of the 
Russian people, above which floats a thin layer of a different 
type. This upper layer consisted, in bygone prerevolutionary 
years, of the aristocracy, the bureaucracy, and the bourgeoisie; 
now it is formed by the communist party, the soviet bureau¬ 
cracy, and the factory workers. 

I saw the peasant ( muzhik ) from the railroad window, in 
the streets of Moscow and of Kharkov, during my wanderings 
in the Donetz Coal Basin, and on my week-end trips along 


134 


OBSERVATIONS OF COUNTRY LIFE 

the Donetz River. The men are still heavily bearded, while 
the urban Russians are mostly shaven. All the muzhiks still 
wear boots and they are fond of sheepskins. They always 
wear a cap and never a hat. They are still the typical picture 
of a Russian, as described in stories and pictured in illustra¬ 
tions, and with whose appearance we are all familiar. 

It is an entirely different thing to meet him in life, instead 
of in fiction, and yet he is lovable, kind, friendly, and very 
simple, as he has always been, and he always will be. He is 
that element in Russia that never seems to have changed very 
much—like the depths of the ocean, whose surface has been 
torn by storms, but which seems to be immovable, eternally 
the same. 


135 



Chapter XI 

SOVIET PHILOSOPHY AND POLICIES 

O N a Saturday evening in July, a man called whom I 
had met in one of the offices and who had asked for 
permission to visit me. I supposed he wanted to practice 
English, which was a very common cause of social contact with 
us. We soon became engaged in conversation. I let my new 
friend explain many things to me, without committing myself 
very much. He had a German name—Schlosser—and said 
that he was a Jew. He did not profess to be a Communist 
but he knew their doctrines very well and sympathized with 
them. He stuck to a dogma which seemed to be a common 
belief in Russia: “Either the entire world must become com¬ 
munistic, or Russia will become a bourgeois democracy. It 
is impossible that part of the world should be democratic and 


136 







PHILOSOPHY AND POLICIES 


another part, communistic.” I did not argue; for I did not 
feel at all competent to judge this idea; still less was I con¬ 
vinced of its truth. 

I was much interested, however, in what my visitor said 
about competitive individualism as practiced in America and 
Western Europe and collective socialism as it rules in Russia. 
He admitted that a competitive system sharpens intellect and 
will-power and develops resourcefulness and self-confidence 
perhaps to a higher degree than the collectivistic system, where 
nobody fights anybody else and where complete team-work is 
primarily essential. He defended collectivism on the basis 
that it excludes the enormous waste of competitive advertising 
and selling and abolishes middlemen in business; and, besides, 
that it is possible to replace the training obtained by competi¬ 
tion through education. He added: “Your individual cor¬ 
porations work with an admirable efficiency and economy and 
we try to learn from them. But the inefficiency and wasteful¬ 
ness of your political and national economy are terrible, and 
we wish to avoid that.” We never settled the problem. 

Another evening I had invited a young communist friend to 
accompany me to the theatre, where a play was staged by 
Mayerhold’s company from Moscow. My companion was 
supposed to interpret the Russian play wherever necessary. 
Our seats in a box cost four rubles apiece. Admission prices 
were generally high, but the theatre was packed. I supposed 
that working-men could get seats cheaper through their or¬ 
ganizations, as it seemed impossible for them to pay the high 


137 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


prices. The title of the play was Ritchi Kitai, which means in 
English, “China, roar.” It was a propaganda play, like most 
modem Russian dramas. However, many of the classical plays 
are also still given. 

Ritchi Kitai opens in a Chinese port with a British battle¬ 
ship in the background. The scenery is extremely primitive, 
of boards, barrels, beams, but real water. A group of Chinese 
coolies under a foreman is ready to load a steamer. The 
trader appears. He is an American dressed in a golf suit with 
a tropical helmet. He mistreats the coolies and cheats them 
out of their wages. There is much howling and lamenting 
among the coolies. The next scene is played on the British 
battleship. The officers drink with English ladies and with 
the nuns from a mission. The American trader comes aboard 
for a visit and exchanges kicks with a British officer by way 
of greeting. Later he dances with the women. But on his 
way to shore he quarrels with a Chinese boatman about the 
fare and is drowned during the fight. Now the British cap¬ 
tain demands the life of two Chinese fishermen in revenge for 
the drowned American, and the members of the fishermen’s 
union draw lots. An old bearded fellow and a strong young 
man draw the fatal lots and are taken over by the Chinese 
port police. The Chinese governor and a Chinese student-inter¬ 
preter appear and plead with the British captain, who treats 
them contemptuously. The suicide of a Chinese boy servant 
on the battleship does not move the captain nor does the howl¬ 
ing of the Chinese women. He threatens to bombard the port 


138 


PHILOSOPHY AND POLICIES 


if the two fishermen are not executed at once. They are gar- 
roted on the stage by the executioner, but the British battleship 
is called away, because a revolution against Europeans has 
broken out in Shanghai. The Chinese rejoice that the day of 
freedom from servitude to foreigners is dawning—so does the 
audience. 

The playing of the actors and the lighting effects were superb, 
and the action was intelligible even to those who did not 
understand Russian. 

The audience was deeply moved, and hatred of England in 
particular and of the western world in general were at white 
heat. But a Western European or an American was perfectly 
safe in this crowd. Their animosity was only against prin¬ 
ciples, not against persons. 

My friend and I walked home and discussed the play and 
its wider aspects—the struggle between the communistic and 
the capitalistic world. Such discussions were always inter¬ 
esting to me, and the dialogue consisted of my questions and 
the answers of the other party. I always refrained from ex¬ 
pressing any opinion myself. 

The gist of my companion’s argument was: “Why should 
a successful or unusually able man get an exorbitant return 
for his work? Is it not enough if he has an income sufficient 
to cover all reasonable needs for himself and his family, like 
lodging, food, some books, some pleasure, some physical recrea¬ 
tion, old age and sick benefits, and good education for his 
children? All this he might have several times better than the 


139 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


common, untrained, and mediocre or poor worker. Is it not 
sufficient for him to get five times as much as the lowest paid 
worker? Why should he get a thousand times more? His 
services are not worth a thousand times more than those of 
the poorest worker.” 

It took more than an hour to walk back to my apartment, 
which was in close neighborhood to that of my communist 
friend, and we discussed, or rather he explained, his theories 
untiringly. They were interesting. But I wondered how the 
theories would transform themselves into realities. 

Another time, I heard a story from a Russian engineer in 
Kharkov. He had saved a little money and bought, with 
the help of the government loan, an apartment in a cooperative 
flat building. He had also acquired, through saving, a few 
shares in a cooperative store and some bonds from the govern¬ 
ment loans. In a small, very small, sense he had become a 
capitalist, and all with the knowledge and cooperation of the 
Soviet Government. I did not understand how any accumu¬ 
lation of funds could be favorably looked upon by the Soviet 
Government. My friend explained it to me. He said, “We 
do not save for investment or production, but only for con¬ 
sumption. In Russia only the state invests for productive 
purposes.” 

My question to Russians was often, “How can the individual 
initiative be stimulated without expectation of gain?” They 
usually answered, “Do you expect professors, ministers, scien¬ 
tific research workers, army officers, and public servants in 


140 




PHILOSOPHY AND POLICIES 


any country to become rich, or do these people lack all incen¬ 
tive for work?” 

Undoubtedly, from an American standpoint, the abolish¬ 
ment of large personal gains and of the prospect of controlling 
great wealth seems a strong deterrent to the exertion of great 
energy. Yet even the European point of view, not only that 
of Russia, is quite different. The gradual absorption and de¬ 
velopment of large industries in Germany by the state has 
not left these industries without the services of outstanding 
administrators and technicians, in spite of the competition with 
the great private concerns of Germany. The Director General 
of the Prussian State Railway System may have a salary of 
ten or fifteen thousand dollars a year, which is probably con¬ 
siderably less than the income of the President of the General 
Electric of Germany or of the Krupp Works. The President 
of the Reichs-Bank has probably much less income than the 
President of the Disconto-Bank. Private enterprise rose in 
Germany towards the end of the nineteenth century to un¬ 
dreamed-of proportions, but was only slowly and gradually 
able to interest ambitious young men, because they usually 
preferred the prestige of state service to the richer returns of 
private business. Without the stimulus of big profits rose 
a very efficient and very honest class of state servants in Ger¬ 
many along administrative, judicial, educational, scientific, and 
religious lines. This is not impossible in Russia, and the 
absence of a big bonus may even direct men to occupations 
like science or teaching which they would not choose in a 


141 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


country of free competitive individualism because of the lack 
of commensurate reward in those branches. 

I was under the impression that the directors of banks and 
of great state corporations in Russia were men of unusual 
energy and working ability, equal to men at the head of large 
corporations in Western Europe or America. 

Russian society is being rebuilt from proletarian stock where 
the ideas of great private business never penetrated. The 
economic philosophy of Russia is state capitalism only, and 
it will be seen in time whether it succeeds or fails. 

On my way through town, I spent a little time studying 
wall posters. My knowledge of Russian had made sufficient 
progress to enable me to read them without a dictionary. They 
were on display on the walls of the houses, in shop windows, 
in vestibules, and house entrances, and in all offices and corri¬ 
dors of office buildings. They contained advertisements or were 
political cartoons. The latter usually derided England, some¬ 
times France or Italy, rarely America or Germany. Priests 
and religion were satirized, also the capitalistic class in general. 
The proletariat of all countries was extolled, and also the so- 
called oppressed races, like American Negroes, Chinese, 
Ukrainians in Poland, Macedonians in Greece and Serbia, 
and others. 

Here is another story of bureaucratic mentality. A few 
years ago, in the neighborhood of Smiev, a paper mill ran 
short of material. In order to keep it going, all owners of 
books were requested to surrender their volumes, supposedly 


142 


PHILOSOPHY AND POLICIES 


for the endowment of a public library. Instead, the books were 
pulped into new paper and the latter used for the print¬ 
ing of books again. This procedure kept the mill busy and 
the workers in pay, but reduced the amount of available books. 

I sometimes stopped in Moscowskaya Street before a store 
containing natural history objects. It is a regular “Naturalien- 
handiung” as these things were called in Germany and Austria 
during my boyhood times. To such a place I used to carry 
the pennies saved from my weekly allowance and buy butter¬ 
flies, beetles, minerals, mounted specimens of birds, exotic 
lizards preserved in alcohol, shells, and what-not. Every boy 
in my time used to collect something, and there was a scientific 
interest, although of a somewhat childish nature, connected 
with this activity. All that I saw again in Russia. Innumerable 
were the stores where such objects were sold and innumerable 
must have been the young customers. The American boy is 
too keen to make money and to buy something worth while 
with it instead of collecting butterflies. The Western European 
boy also has lost his inclination for such things in recent years. 

The U. S. S. R. is more Asiatic than was the old empire. 
Politically, there is no difference between Great Russia and 
West Siberia. Both belong to the Russian Socialistic Fed¬ 
erated Soviet Republic, which is the most important member 
of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. New Asiatic 
members of the Union could be absorbed as autonomous 
Soviet Republics on an equal footing with the existing European 
and Asiatic members of the U. S. S. R. Soviet Republics of 


143 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


China, India, Afghanistan, and Persia were kept in mind by 
the organizers of the U. S. S. R. 

TTie tendency to admit Asiatic members of the U. S. S. R. 
not as colonies of Russia, but as equals of Russia, has created 
a Eurasian world where the boundary between Asia and 
Europe has been eliminated and Orient and Occident really 
meet. It is in sharp contrast to the racial pride of the Anglo- 
Saxon, and the feeling forces itself upon the spectator that 
a great step has been made in Russia away from Western race 
consciousness. The gulf between Russia and the Western, 
especially the Anglo-Saxon, world seems to widen enormously. 
The Western European and the American are losing much of 
their class consciousness, but are increasing their race con¬ 
sciousness as time goes on. In the U. S. S. R., all race con¬ 
sciousness is tabooed and probably stamped out, but the prole¬ 
tarian class consciousness has increased by leaps and bounds 
and is encouraged by all kinds of influences in every pos¬ 
sible way. 

I am convinced that Russia is the only country which has 
solved its racial problems. Every race in the Soviet Union 
is an autonomous state in the federation, with its own language 
and cultural individuality and without the slightest supremacy 
of one race over another one. The Russian race, as the strongest 
and most advanced of the larger races of the Union, rather 
leans back in its treatment of the others, giving more autonomy 
than is sometimes justified. Of course, the Russian language 
is the official language of the federation, but the local lam 


144 


PHILOSOPHY AND POLICIES 


guage must be known by everybody who holds a government 
position—and that is almost everybody. 

When we first stopped at Kharkov, we were obliged to get 
Ukrainian passports, for which a fee of twenty-two rubles was 
charged. My Ukrainian passport was taken up when I left 
Kharkov, or I should have kept it as a souvenir. In the Ukraine 
all inscriptions, announcements, postage stamps, etc., are in 
Russian and Ukrainian. Many of the Russians and, in fact, 
many Ukrainians did not know the Ukrainian language, which 
does not differ very greatly from Russian, but enough to give 
some trouble to those who have to learn it now. Formerly, it 
was almost extinct as a literary language and merely a peasant 
jargon, although it had flourished in an important literature of 
former centuries. Now, it has been resurrected from the dead 
in order to provide an official language for the Ukrainian Re* 
public, member of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. 
This new, almost artificial, language, was reconstructed largely 
with the help of the Ruthenian of Galicia, where a branch of 
the earlier Ukrainian group of dialects had survived under 
Austrian rule in spite of Polish attempts to suppress it. This 
choice of the Ruthenian may have been influenced by the 
thought of attracting the Ruthenians from the Polish Republic 
into the orbit of the U. S. S. R. 

Toward the Crimean Peninsula and in North Caucasia, one 
begins to see signboards in railroad stations in Tartar and 
Armenian, and the Russian paper money has also Tartar, Ar¬ 
menian, and Turkestanian inscriptions. There may be other 


145 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


oriental languages represented which my linguistic limitations 
prevented me from recognizing. 

The extreme leniency of the U. S. S. R. toward all non- 
Russian races and languages is based partly on the principle 
that all race struggle is supplanted by the class struggle, and 
partly on a desire to facilitate the fulfilment of the most com¬ 
mon slogan found in Russia: “Proletarians of all countries 
unite.” 


146 


Chapter XII 

TYPES OF CHARACTER AND RACE 


A GREAT character was the janitor in our office build¬ 
ing. His old Russian title of dvornik was changed by 
the revolution into the much more pretentious commandant . 
He was a heavily bearded man with whom we had to make 
special arrangements if we wished to come back in the evening 
or on Sundays. He was always very willing to accommodate 
us, and did not begrudge any effort to meet our wishes. Only 
once I felt slightly provoked with him. My desk seemed to 
house numberless bedbugs, which appeared in all drawers and 
sometimes on top. I could not explain the origin of this in¬ 
vasion. But the Commandant admitted that, owing to the 
great shortage in housing facilities, a comrade had slept re¬ 
cently on my desk during the night. He promised to prohibit 


147 





GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


this night service in the future, and the bedbugs disappeared 
after a while. 

I often noticed the complete indifference to time and locality 
when a comrade desired to take a nap. Anywhere on the street, 
in the entrance of a house, not to mention public parks and 
railroad stations, people could be seen sleeping, not only at 
night, but at any time during the day. One morning I could 
see from my window on the fourth floor a man who was sup¬ 
posed to repair a roof on a neighboring building. He thought 
himself unnoticed; and as the sun was shining brightly and the 
day was warm, the comrade stretched himself on the roof and 
took a long nap. 

On the other hand, I saw the men in shops and mines work 
industriously and efficiently. The Russian is a good worker 
when he works. There is a strain of laziness in him, but, under 
proper surveillance, and with a sufficient incentive, his in¬ 
herited aversion to the strenuous life is overcome. A thousand 
years of hopeless toiling with no incentive whatsoever are 
bound to show themselves in a disregard for the value of time. 
It was here that the most conspicuous educational campaign 
among adults in Russia was being waged—for the valuation 
of time. 

A striking feature of the Russian proletarian character is an 
insatiable curiosity which, if directed to the acquisition of useful 
knowledge, may make a very well informed person of the Rus¬ 
sian proletarian. He is very plastic material, not set in his ways, 
and quite open for re-education. After a generation or earlier, 


148 


TYPES OF CHARACTER AND RACE 


the conventional notion of the Russian will doubtless have to 
be considerably revised. 

The best result of the revolution is the self-respect which it 
gave to the suppressed and despised lower classes of Russia. 
Now, the Russian proletarian feels himself “just as good as 
anybody” and the heavy social burden, which formerly rested 
on him, is gone. He sees the daylight shine on his face and 
he carries his head erect. The ugly hump on his back is gone, 
and his chest sticks out. 

Now he reads newspapers. In fact, he has learned to read 
—that high and noble art which was formerly an almost ex¬ 
clusive prerogative of the upper and middle classes. He en¬ 
joys many things in life, such as theatres, concerts, libraries, 
club-houses, and he is an enthusiast for amateur dramatic art 
and political, economic, and literary debates. 

When we drew up plans for new mines, we had to include 
not only ample bathing facilities and good homes for the 
workmen, but always a theatre, an athletic field, and a club¬ 
house. Working hours are short, not over eight hours, and 
frequently less, and there is ample time for recreation. 

When the great masses of the people have a chance to de¬ 
velop, they are bound to raise the physical and mental level of 
the entire race. 

I often wondered what will become of the proletariat when 
only proletarians will be left and when the old bourgeoisie has 
died out. How is class consciousness possible with only one 
class? Probably the proletariat will again split into classes. 


149 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


Early in our stay at Kharkov, we met a new character type. 
Her name was Lila. It happened that she was calling on an 
American, who left the apartment soon after we moved in. 
One of our men met her and believed her to be a perfectly 
respectable young lady. She asked him to take her home and 
wanted the same man to meet her the next evening at eight 
o’clock at the corner of our building. Before evening, we had 
acquired a good deal of information about Lila. She was a 
notorious person and also was suspected of being an agent for 
the G. P. U. Sometimes girls of this type are used to get in¬ 
formation from men who might otherwise be inaccessible. 

Of course, we let Lila wait on the street, but an hour after 
the appointed time of the rendezvous, she appeared in our 
apartment. She was told that she was not wanted but she 
said, “That doesn’t matter; I want you. My purpose in 
meeting you is to practice English.” She was a rather attrac¬ 
tive girl, not at all showy, but well-groomed and well-dressed. 
We tried to persuade her to leave the apartment, but she simply 
took a seat in the dining-room and said she would wait until 
we changed our minds. Thereupon, we locked ourselves in 
our rooms and let her wait two hours. When someone went 
into the dining-room, she was still waiting. In Russia it is 
impossible to throw anyone out of an apartment or to lay hands 
on anyone. Ultimately, however, the housekeeper was asked 
to put her out, which she did with a voluminous amount of 
Russian, which was so strong that none of us understood it. 
Lila left deeply hurt. Lila was the only representative of this 


150 


TYPES OF CHARACTER AND RACE 


type whom we had met so far in Russia. Prostitution is severely 
combated by the Soviet Government and very much restricted 
in comparison with Tsaristic times, when St. Petersburg was 
world-renowned for the magnificence of its brothels. 

The next evening Lila returned. We saw her standing at 
the corner of the street below our windows. Probably she 
expected to waylay some one of us. Unsuccessful in this en¬ 
terprise, she rang the bell at 9 P. M. We left the chain on 
the door, opened it a little and, seeing her, shut the door in 
her face. 

I remember noticing in the parks one day small groups, 
usually one or two families of father, mother, and a swarm of 
children, who were so indescribably dirty that they even con¬ 
trasted with the beggars and wild orphans. They were the 
dirtiest human faces and figures I had ever seen. The women’s 
hair was a wilderness, their clothes, gaily colored rags; the 
children, half naked or stark naked, and absolutely unwashed 
and unkempt. Dogs and cats looked cleaner than such human 
beings. Of course, they were all begging. I was told that 
they were gypsies. I had seen gypsies in Hungary and in 
the Balkans, and I thought I could recognize them. But these 
bundles of rags, hair, and dirt were something entirely new 
to me. 

In our office, as in every important office of Soviet Russia, 
we found Jews in leading positions, especially in matters of 
finance. But there were also young Jewish engineers in our 
drafting room, and I saw others in the Donugol and Yugostal 


151 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


offices and in the mines and shops. The crowded conditions 
of Kharkov and Moscow was largely due to the influx of Jews 
who were formerly barred from these cities. 

I also heard of the Jewish agricultural colonies in southern 
Russia. Jews are taking up farming and all trades. They have 
to do it, because the middleman’s class has been obliterated in 
the economic life, and the Jews are primarily middlemen. 

The Soviet regime has liberated the Jew politically and so¬ 
cially, but has destroyed his chances for trade. He is forced 
into all kinds of occupations—bureaucracy, politics, manufac¬ 
ture, and farming. He makes himself felt wherever he goes by 
his cleverness and aggressiveness. Neither of these qualities 
makes him popular among gentile Russians, and there is a rising 
tide of anti-semitism. He is a staunch supporter of the present 
Russian regime. An overthrow of it would mean pogroms 
more terrible than ever. 

When I was riding on the train toward Rostov-on-Don, I 
was in the old land of the Don Cossacks. I looked around to 
see some Cossacks, about whom I had heard so much. I ex¬ 
pected them to be mounted men with beards, high fur caps, Cir¬ 
cassian coats with rows of cartridges across the breast, red 
striped riding breeches, boots, and spurs, armed with lance, 
sword, dagger, and rifle. I saw none. There were plenty of 
strong, fine-looking men, but the picturesque Cossack of the 
old times has passed out of history. The Soviet Government 
has done away with the Cossacks. They were too much sus¬ 
pected of tsarism and autocracy. 


152 


TYPES OF CHARACTER AND RACE 


In Krindachevka, I had met a German engineer, born in 
Russia, whose family had been settled in Russia since 1797. He 
spoke perfect German and so did his wife and children. He 
himself had spent a number of years in Germany, where he 
got his training as a mining engineer. 

Later, in Artemovsk, I was driven in an automobile, belong¬ 
ing to the Donugol Trust, by a man who spoke excellent, 
scholarly German. He called himself a “Kolonist,” and so 
did my friend, the mining engineer. Both men told me of the 
large German settlements in the Ukraine and on the Volga 
where German colonies had been established by Catherine the 
Great, who wished to improve the agriculture of southeastern 
Russia by bringing in German farmers. These German col¬ 
onies have flourished and have preserved their ancient culture 
and Protestant religion. 

There is now a so-called German republic on the Volga, a 
member of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. German 
is its official language. Recently, many Germans emigrated 
from Russia, because of the measures taken against the more 
wealthy peasants, which were especially hard for the German 
farmers who had formed a very important element of the 
Kulak class. 

We were invited to tea on a Saturday evening in August 
by Nata’s mother, and met her entire family—father, mother, 
and their two daughters. Also some friends, Lala and Anna 
Alexeyevna, were present. We listened to music, talked, and 
had tea, wines, and cakes. The German occupation of Kharkov 


153 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


during the Great War was discussed. We heard that the chil¬ 
dren liked the Germans, and that many people cried when the 
Germans left because they did not know what would follow. 

Apparently, our friends belonged to the solid type of Rus¬ 
sian home folk who have preserved the family conceptions of 
old Russia, untouched by radical reforms. I found this type 
of family life in all Russian homes which we visited. The 
girls in these families are modest and observe the old notions 
of proprieties. They do not visit men in their rooms, nor can 
they be seen by men, without chaperons, except after long ac¬ 
quaintance. These girls represent the old Russian type. 

The revolution has developed a new type of girl—the so- 
called Soviet Miss (Soryetskaya barnisha). She is emanci¬ 
pated and meets a man on an absolutely equal basis. She shares 
his sports, his political life, every form of his activities, and does 
not hesitate to call on him in his room whenever she likes. This 
familiarity does not necessarily mean sexual relations. There 
may be some of that between the Soviet Misses and their young 
men, but many of these girls are undoubtedly innocent. These 
are the two classes of Russian women I have met. 

The Russian peasant women love gay colors. Their skirts 
are often red, blue, or green, and so are their kerchiefs which 
they wear over their heads. They apparently never wear a hat. 
Usually they are barefoot, but when they dress up, they wear 
heavy boots like the men. 

I visited the houses of peasants in the country. They are 
picturesquely odd. The walls are brightly colored, and there 


154 





She assured me it was the best melon of the lot because a 
mouse had eaten a hole m it 


1SS 







TYPES OF CHARACTER AND RACE 


is an ikon in the corner of the room. While the walls, the 
floor, and the windows are kept immaculately clean, the beds 
are not. In fact, they frequently sleep on the porcelain stove, 
which is provided with benches and niches and has a flat top. 
Very often, a whole family will cluster around it to keep warm 
during the long winter nights. I believe the Russian peasant 
takes off only his boots when he goes to sleep and usually sleeps 
in his heavy clothing, summer and winter, a custom that is 
hardly conducive to personal cleanliness. 

Once in a Ukrainian village on the Donetz River, I wanted 
to buy sweet melons from a Russian peasant woman. She 
offered them for ten kopecks apiece, except one, which was 
fifteen kopecks. I asked why the difference in price. She as¬ 
sured me it must be the best melon in the whole bunch, because 
a mouse had eaten a hole in it. For the sake of curiosity, I 
bought the mouse-eaten melon, along with several others. 

It is rather difficult for a foreigner to establish contact with 
a peasant. The latter knows only Russian and usually a dia¬ 
lect like the Ukrainian, or Little-Russian, or White-Russian, 
or some other, there being probably over a hundred dialects 
in Russia. He never knows any other language, except that 
in rare cases he may understand a little German. My con¬ 
versations with Russian peasants were either in the hands of 
interpreters or restricted to a few words. 

During my trip from Artemovsk to Kharkov, I had plenty of 
contacts with the real proletariat. Of course I met them in 
the mines, the shops, the office, and everywhere in town. All 


157 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


of these contacts were pleasant. I never was imposed upon or 
treated otherwise than with courtesy and consideration. I 
learned to like these people and to feel perfectly at ease with 
them. They adapted themselves to a stranger the best they 
could and tried to make him feel at home. Never did I notice 
the nonchalant “independence” with which the foreigner, and 
especially the educated foreigner, is treated by the American 
working classes, so long as he has not caught up with the 
mannerisms and idiosyncrasies of the bell-boy, elevator-man, 
janitor, street-car conductor, and similar self-important func¬ 
tionaries whom he has to meet on their own level. 

In the city of Rostov-on-Don I had seen numerous Circas¬ 
sians, many of whom were peddlers, but some of whom were 
waiters, or small shopkeepers. Their presence gave an Asiatic 
atmosphere to the town. The farther one goes east, especially 
southeast in Russia, the more intense this Asiatic coloring be¬ 
comes. It begins at Moscow. Among the visitors who flock 
to the national capital can be seen Tartars, Bashkeers, Kal¬ 
mucks, Turkestanians, Georgians, Armenians, and Mongols 
of all sorts, including Chinese. I saw also many Mongolian 
soldiers, and remembered how they had been used as execu¬ 
tioners during the Civil War. 

To American and Western European eyes, all of Russia 
has an oriental touch. The shape of the church domes, the 
high yokes under which the horses are harnessed to the car¬ 
riages, the fur caps worn all the year round by many people, 
the embroidered Russian shirt, which is worn outside the 


158 


TYPES OF CHARACTER AND RACE 


trousers, instead of inside, and innumerable little traits, these 
all suggest Asia. 

From the windows of our office, I could see at the door of 
the Bazaar the figure of a beggar. But he looked quite dif¬ 
ferent from all the other Russian beggars. His clothes were 
clean. He had a clean collar; his face was washed and shaved; 
yet he received alms from the passers-by. His “office hours” 
Were from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon, and 
he was regularly brought by a woman in the morning, who 
called for him in the afternoon. He always smoked cigarettes. 
His eyes seemed to be in bad condition, because he wore dark 
glasses. In his hands was a tablet which read: “Please give to 
the teacher.” He tells his story: “I was a teacher but when I 
became seventy years old, I lost my place. I am begging for 
my own support and for my wife’s. Sometime I must have 
committed a wrong, I do not know what, for which I am 
punished now.” 

I heard that the former chief of police of Kharkov, with the 
rank of a general, the so-called Polizeimeister, as the Russians 
called him in bygone days, had also spent his last years as 
a beggar. 

But these unfortunate wrecks of an uprooted society were 
not the typical Russian beggars, the oriental begging dervish 
in a Russian edition, whom we saw around churches, in parks, 
at railroad stations, and everywhere in the city. This type 
is a dignified, national figure, and rather well treated by the 
public. One of them got angry at a railroad station restaurant 
159 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


and smashed his stick into the glassware set up on a buffet. 
Afterwards, he executed an orderly retreat with little molesta¬ 
tion, since no policeman was around. Probably the latter 
would not have arrested him, even had he been there. 

At an inopportune moment, we almost had an encounter 
with a member of the begging fraternity. One man in our 
crowd, who had sampled too many glasses of vodka, threat¬ 
ened the beggar. The latter drew himself up in a most digni¬ 
fied posture, defiance in his eyes, like a prophet of the Old 
Testament, but was quickly persuaded by one of our Russian 
companions to withdraw. 

There was a very old “gentleman” in the largest public park 
of Kharkov, who seemed to patronize this place as his particular 
field of business. He had a white beard, long white hair, was 
dressed in a very patchy attire, and wore a white Russian fur 
cap in the hottest weather. Everybody gave him coppers. He 
seemed to be a regular landmark. When he saw us, he took 
off his cap and made a lengthy address which netted him a 
few kopecks. 

A cute little girl would dance around me for a number of 
blocks on Sumskaya Street. It was hard to resist her entreaties 
for kopecks, and if I had some in my pocket, she got them. 

Most beggars I passed up unnoticed so as not to encourage 
their clan to swarm about us. 

Then, too, there were numerous, rather eccentric looking fig¬ 
ures to be seen on the streets and in the hotels—revolutionary 
dandies, whose wild black hair, red shirts, or fantastic trousers 


160 


TYPES OF CHARACTER AND RACE 


were intended to show them as more advanced than the rest 
of mankind. Sometimes this eccentricity appeared in a reduc¬ 
tion of clothing. Young men walked around in abbreviated 
bathing trunks, which were never worn in the water, or girls 
appeared in similar trunks, plus an indication of a shirt. 
Usually, the exposed bodies looked splendid outdoors. Once, 
I saw a crowd go to a banquet in Kharkov’s best hotel. One 
man had no shirt on at all, but shoes, trousers, and a transpar¬ 
ent undershirt, over which his trouser suspenders were drawn. 

We once met a very peculiar character in the State Park 
on the outskirts of Kharkov. He was an international hobo, 
an Austrian, who had spent some time in America and later 
drifted into Kharkov. Here he would waylay the few Amer¬ 
icans who stopped on business or as tourists and try to ob¬ 
tain money from them, pretending to be an American. He 
wore clothing of the kind which the poorer class of working¬ 
men use. I do not know what his regular occupation was, but 
we had been warned of him by several American engineers, who 
were here when we first arrived. He used the park as his hunt¬ 
ing-ground for foreigners, who can easily be recognized by the 
cut and quality of their clothes and shoes and their modern 
hats and neckties. He could pose as an American, a German, 
an Austrian, and probably as a native of a few other countries. 
Similar types can be observed in many out-of-the-way places 
like Russia or Mexico, and especially in the Levant. Con¬ 
stantinople has perhaps the choicest collection of international 
vagabonds on earth. 


161 



Chapter XIII 

SCIENCE, EDUCATION, AND CULTURE 

I VISITED the Geological Museum of the former Univer¬ 
sity of Kharkov. The Russian geologists of the Donugol 
had promised to take me to see the geological collections of the 
“Institute” as the old University was now called, and I re¬ 
minded them. We went to the University buildings and en¬ 
tered into a building situated in a court. The collection of 
fossil plants from the Donetz Coal Fields, which were col¬ 
lected by Zalessky, Russia’s foremost coal paleontologist, was 
interesting and valuable, but looked neglected. The Museum 
was also used as a storage room for old furniture and was 
dusty. Nobody seemed to have worked here for centuries. 
Soviet Russia evidently concentrates its attention upon ele¬ 
mentary education, somewhat at the expense of higher educa- 


162 




SCIENCE, EDUCATION, CULTURE 


tion. The scientific men of pre-revolutionary Russia had ex¬ 
cellent Russian and western European training. The growing 
young generation of scientists in Soviet Russia have no western 
European training, being educated only in the reduced Russian 
universities of today. Until these institutions pick up again, 
there will grow up one or more generations of poorly trained 
scientists in Russia, and the country will be at a low ebb of 
higher intellectual life when the still living older generation of 
scientific men has died out. 

A similar process takes place in all countries whose intel¬ 
lectual life has to be reconstructed after a terrible catastrophe. 
So it was in the southern states of the United States after the 
Civil War. Practical subjects demand immediate attention: 
engineering, agriculture, chemistry, commerce. The colleges 
emphasize them and neglect the theoretical studies. This is 
true for the bulk, but leaves many exceptions. There are some 
scholars of the old school in Moscow and Leningrad, who 
receive every possible kind of encouragement by the present 
government, but they are exceptions. 

What is omitted in financial support and scientific encour¬ 
agement is made up by the teaching of “methods.” I heard 
that new American educational methods are introduced in the 
institutions of higher learning in Soviet Russia; that the re¬ 
search spirit and active cooperation of students is fostered. 
The professors no longer lecture and teach, but conduct seminar 
courses in which the student is supposed to work spontaneously, 
originally, and independently. Just as in America, such a 


163 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


method produces excellent results under the leadership of out¬ 
standing men, but, just as elsewhere, it becomes a farce and 
self-deception if conducted under mediocre or poor professors. 
The latter seems to be quite often the case in Soviet Russia, as 
well as elsewhere. 

The Germans, who appear to have a particular talent for 
academic teaching, have taken a different course since their 
debacle in the Great War. They “reconstructed” first of all 
their outstanding “men.” When the rank and file of academic 
men were still suffering from lack of funds, the leading profes¬ 
sorships were endowed with salaries of $10,000 to $15,000, in 
order to preserve in individual cases the very highest peaks of 
university work. Other countries would have acted differently 
under similar circumstances. They would have started with 
a strengthening on the basis of the academic hierarchy, or, in 
other words, would have applied a democratic policy to the 
Republic of Sciences and Letters. The Germans apply a 
strictly aristocratic policy to their most democratic institution, 
the University. Who knows which is better? Only the future 
will show. 

In our drafting room there was a young communist, with 
whom I became quite well acquainted. We saw each other oc¬ 
casionally outside of the office, and he told me much about the 
youth movement in Russia. An enormous enthusiasm seems 
to have taken hold of the proletarian boys and girls in the 
U. S. S. R., together with a considerable self-confidence, which 
probably stood in direct contrast to the cringing attitude of 


164 


SCIENCE, EDUCATION, CULTURE 


the prerevolutionary proletariat. They have athletic games, 
dramatic clubs, political and economic debates, together with 
an enormous amount of “activities” which would put to shame 
all the college activities of our busiest universities. The young 
mind of the Pioneers (10-16 years of age) and of the Kom¬ 
somols (16-24 years of age) is constantly kept at a fever heat 
of excitement and tension. It is a question whether much 
solid studying or working can be done under the circumstances. 

The German youth movement seems to be similar, except 
that it is not in the hands of a single political party as in 
Russia, but represents a variety of youth movements organized 
by a number of political parties. It is an old saying, “Catch 
them young.” The great hope of the communists in Russia 
is the influence they have on the young people, and the en¬ 
thusiasm for the party which they kindle and spread by con¬ 
trolling the coming generation. 

I once went to a book store on the Nikolaevskaya Square in 
search of a Russian textbook on mining. Not finding what 
I wanted, I browsed among the books on the shelves of the 
store. Many of them dealt with Marxism, the history of the 
Russian revolution, or with Lenin. Quite a number of the 
books had been written by Lenin himself. I heard that new 
Lenin manuscripts are discovered at a remarkable rate—too 
often for them all to be genuine. Some day, the Lenin bibliog¬ 
raphy will be as voluminous as that on Shakespeare or Goethe. 
The bookstore contained numerous scientific and technical 
books in Russian, German, and English. There were also 


165 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


copies of the great Russian classics, and a few German authors 
were represented. English books read in Russia are only of a 
scientific or technical nature. None but the people of pre¬ 
revolutionary training know English and French literature. 
This bookstore also sold copies of the Manchester Guardian. 

After supper, I usually devoted myself to my Russian books. 
Among them was a grammar with exercises, which I had 
brought from Chicago. Every day I studied it and read news¬ 
papers and technical literature, with the help of a dictionary. 
Oh! what an exasperating language! I learned Italian in six 
weeks, but I felt sure it would take me six years to learn Russian. 

Before going to the U. S. S. R., I spent some time studying 
the Russian language, but with little success. I have come 
in contact with a variety of Germanic and Latin tongues in 
my life and have found it rather easy to acquire a smattering 
or even a reading knowledge in any language I desired—except 
Russian. While in the U. S. S. R., I listened to the spoken 
word, took lessons from a competent teacher, and read much 
in Russian. My progress seemed infinitesimal. The language 
appears so difficult to a western European or an American be¬ 
cause it is outside of all our previous experience. 

The English language is an alloy of German, French, and 
Scandinavian. We all have acquired directly or indirectly a 
large number of Latin word roots. Some of us know more or 
less of French, German, Italian, and Spanish. But no 
Slavonic language, as a rule, enters the educational horizon of 
an American or a western European. On the other hand, 


166 


SCIENCE, EDUCATION, CULTURE 


anybody who speaks Czech, Polish, or Croatian will easily 
acquire a Russian vocabulary. In learning a language it is 
not the grammar but the vocabulary that counts, especially if 
a language is studied for practical purposes and not for college 
credit. 

The Russian alphabet increases the difficulty of the language, 
but not as much as one would think. The alphabet can be 
acquired in a few days, but reading of Russian and memorizing 
of word pictures would be considerably facilitated if the familiar 
Latin alphabet were used in Russian. Perhaps it will be 
introduced in the near future. The Soviet Government has, 
I have been told, considered the matter. Russian can be just 
as easily written in Latin letters as Polish, because both 
languages have almost the same sounds. 

I always carried a little pocket dictionary of Russian with 
me and consulted it continually, increasing in this way my 
vocabulary. Another way is to analyze the meaning of 
geographic and personal names. If you remember the names, 
you also remember the words which make them up. Take 
for instance the city of Nishny Novgorod. Nishny means 
“low”; Nor, “new,” and gorod, “city.” The entire name is, 
therefore, the Low New City. There is a Novgorod on the 
Upper Volga and lower down on the river, a Nishny 
Novgorod. 

I noticed the following practice observed by some Americans 
who could not even read the Russian letters: They carry 
English-Russian dictionaries in their pockets and point to the 


167 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


Russian equivalent of the English word whenever they wish 
to communicate an idea to a Russian. This method works 
well in stores or hotels, but is rather slow for communication 
with street-car conductors and cab men. 

Daily I noticed the intensive interest of the Russians in 
America. A magic power has drawn white men toward the 
American continent for nearly nine hundred years. The first 
one who succumbed to the lure of America was Leif Erikson. 
Later came Columbus. He was followed by the Conquista- 
doresy whose dreams of power and gold were satisfied in 
Mexico and in South America. The Puritans were drawn to 
the Western Hemisphere by their longing for religious inde¬ 
pendence. Still later, the great French explorers—La Salle, 
Joliet, Marquette—strove to build up a new French empire 
on American soil. After the Revolution, America became the 
heaven of all the politically unfree. This lasted beyond the 
year 1848. With the development of the Middle West, 
America became the home of the landseeker, until all govern¬ 
ment land was taken up. 

Now America develops a new charm for Europe. She 
becomes the homeland of mechanized labor, of the machine, 
and of all that goes with it in efficiency, mass production, 
standardization, and high standards of living for the masses. 
All of it may be comprised in the word “Americanization.” 
There are only two countries in the world which have “fallen” 
for it unreservedly and unconditionally—Russia and Germany. 
Both hope to escape ruin, catastrophe, destruction, by praying 
168 


SCIENCE, EDUCATION, CULTURE 

to Sancta America. Both countries are anxious to give their 
soul for Americanization. In Russia, this America-mania has 
produced a machine worship compared with which the adoration 
of the “Golden Calf” by the erring Hebrews was a mere 
bagatelle. Anything from America is desired, worshipped, 
adored, sanctified, be it a fountain pen or a typewriter, a 
Gillette razor, or a Ford tractor. Ford is the most highly 
admired person in Russia. He even puts Lenin in the back¬ 
ground when he appears on the scene. If anybody could still 
be made Tsar, it would be Henry Ford or Edsel Ford. 

The standardization of Russian civilization in the American 
spirit also extends to education. I heard frequently of a 
Dalton method which was being introduced into Russia from 
America. All the fringes and frills of American teaching have 
settled over Russia like a big locust swarm which has been 
happily driven out of one district and into somebody’s else. 

The interest for America has enormously increased the study 
of English—or rather American language, the study of 
American technical methods, and the demand for American 
engineers and other technical advisers. It always seemed to 
me doubtful whether the American experts in Russia would 
even be able to satisfy the great hopes which have been put 
in them. Very likely too much is expected of them. The 
great building program of Russia is a very problematic piece 
of planning, even with American experts helping. There are 
certain limitations. Besides, the American engineers who 
work in Russia are not as free and unhandicapped as at home, 


169 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


nor are they just as enthusiastic about their work and success 
as they would be at home. 

One afternoon, I went to the Skovoroda Museum of the 
Free Ukraine. It has a magnificent collection of paintings, 
mostly by Ukrainian artists, which show many historic events 
from the history of southeastern Russia with its Tartar 
invasions, Cossacks, and Ukrainian noblemen. There are 
many interesting exhibits in the Museum. For instance, a 
collection of beautiful Easter eggs, which are masterpieces in 
their way, and to which an enormous amount of labor must 
have been devoted by artists. Some are porcelain, beautifully 
painted. Some are real eggs and decorated with all sorts of 
ornaments, gilt, and inscriptions and paintings. There are 
also furniture from Ukrainian peasants’ homes, several centuries 
old, and beautifully carved pieces from nobles’ estates. Some 
poets and political leaders of bygone centuries are represented 
by portraits from the brushes of the great Ukrainian painters 
Vasilkovski, Tkachenko, Shevchenko, Berkos, Griinfeld. The 
entire Museum brought vividly to my eyes a civilization of 
which we know nothing in America and in Western Europe, 
because it is so remote and because it represents a country— 
the Ukraine—which had no political independence for hundreds 
of years. 

In the windows of an art shop, I noticed a number of 
cubistic portraits of contemporary Russian statesmen. Cubism 
is a normal form of artistic expression in Russia. Statues of 
revolutionary heroes are often executed in this style. A fine 


170 


SCIENCE, EDUCATION, CULTURE 


illustration is the statue of Artem, the leader of the Ukrainian 
revolution, which I saw in Artemovsk (Bakhmut). It is a 
bold combination of cubes and parallellograms. Only after 
having read the inscriptions does the dubious visitor conclude 
that this object represents a specimen of the human species. 

All executive offices in Russia have at least a bust of Lenin 
and portraits of Lenin, Marx, and Trotzky, also of the pioneer 
socialists Engels and Lassalle, and of General Budeny, the 
Russian hero of the recent Polish-Russian war. 


171 



Chapter XIV 

GOOD-BY TO SOVIETLAND 

At LAST the time came to bid farewell to Sovietland. 
JL X. On September 2, we received information that the 
Technical Board had approved our mine plans. Our work 
was completed, and we had only to wait for a settlement of 
our compensation in order to disband. Three of us were to 
stay in Russia to negotiate extensive new contracts with Donugol 
and Yugostal; while I, with two others, was to return to 
America at once. 

The next day, which was Saturday, we gave a banquet for 
such members of the Technical Board and other friends as 
were in Kharkov. I went shopping in preparation for the 
banquet, and quote from my account book: 

Six bottles of French champagne—48 rubles 


172 





GOOD-BY TO SOVIETLAND 


One bottle cordial—11.50 rubles 
Two bottles cognac—9.80 rubles 
Port wine—7 rubles. 

The cordial was rank. It was supposed to be Curacao and 
had a ferocious taste. I spilled a little of it on my hand, and 
it blistered immediately. 

The banquet, however, was a great success. Numerous 
speeches were made in English, German, and Russian, and 
our guests were very happy. Nobody was drunk, but every¬ 
body was elated. Everything pleasant that our linguistic 
facilities permitted was said about the United States and 
Russia. One dear old gentleman made the most exquisite ad¬ 
dress in Russian to us. Unhappily we could not understand a 
word he said. 

Our crowd made one faux pas . We put our dinner suits 
on in honour of our guests. They did not have any and, 
therefore, may have felt embarrassed. 

During the banquet the most imposing procession of athletic 
and political associations of Kharkov happened to pass under 
our windows with torchlights. We failed to discover the 
reason for the array. We all separated after the dinner, with 
best wishes for each other and hopes for a happy reroir. 

On my last Sunday in Kharkov I visited many churches 
to glut myself once more with Russian church singing. After¬ 
wards I strolled through the parks to see again a Sunday 
crowd of singing and frolicking Russian humanity. The next 
day I went shopping for gifts to bring home. I bought several 
173 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


beautiful Ukrainian tablecloths of embroidered linen, several 
Ukrainian shirts, also some Tartar caps, and some little 
bric-a-brac. 

Our pay was not due for two weeks after the approval of 
our plans by the Technical Board. I asked the Chief Engineer 
of the Project Bureau of the Donugol whether he could speed 
up the payment to shorten our idle stay in Kharkov. He 
answered, “It is too late today to get you the money. Can 
you wait until tomorrow?” 

Sure enough, the Commission’s fee was paid to us the next 
day, according to our wishes, in Russian rubles and foreign 
drafts payable in dollars. We took just enough Russian 
money to get those of us who were to travel immediately to 
the Russian border, and I had a draft for $3,000 on Berlin to 
provide travel money for myself and two companions to 
America. The same day we applied for permits to leave 
Russia, giving our exact destination and the frontier station 
on our prospective route. 

On Wednesday we visited friends to say good-by and 
began packing. The latter was quite a problem. I had a 
whole steamer-trunk full of interesting fossils, minerals, and 
coal samples. I had been instructed to make a list of every¬ 
thing and to have this list forwarded through the Donugol 
to the frontier station, Shepetovka. I listed everything as coal 
samples and fossils, leaving it to the customs inspector to 
consider topazes, amethysts, garnets, azurines, and other 
minerals as samples if he wanted to. The books were put in 


174 


GOOD-BY TO SOVIETLAND 


a large basket to be shipped out by the Donugol, since we 
did not want to bother with the Russian censor. 

I gave everything I could spare to some Russian friends. 
I made presents only to such as were not officials, because 
we had to be careful not to make any gifts to government 
representatives. I gave away my wrist watch, fountain pen, 
safety-razor blades, sleeping bags, towels, boots, underwear, 
letter paper, spare clothing, and socks. I burned my corre¬ 
spondence and such non-technical notes as I could not con¬ 
veniently carry on my person. 

By Friday, September 9, the permits to leave Russia had 
been received. I bought tickets to Warsaw from the Dorutra, 
which is a German-Russian travel bureau. It promised to have 
a representative at Shepetovka to facilitate the Russian customs 
inspection. It is easier to get into Russia than to get out 
of it. Permits to leave cost twenty-two rubles for American 
citizens. One of the three of us to go was a British subject. 
He paid only six rubles; yet this was only a few months 
after England broke off diplomatic relations with Russia. Our 
three tickets to Warsaw, including sleeping accommodations 
for four, in order to keep out unwelcome company, cost 43.15 
rubles a person. The handling of our baggage was 9.50 
rubles; the checking of the baggage, 12.50 rubles. 

Saturday was the day set for our departure. We bought 
food and drinks for the trip, there being no dining car on the 
Kharkov-Kiev-Warsaw train. Our Russian cook had prepared 
much for our comfort—cold chickens, cold eggs, salads, and 


175 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


a big cake with our names in sugar on it. Of course, mineral 
water and cognac were not left out of our supplies, and a liberal 
stock of cigarettes was included. 

At 6 P. M. the train was due to leave Kharkov. We 
were at the depot at 5:30, and visited with friends who had 
come in great numbers to see us off. Little presents were given 
to us, such as flowers, fruit, and decorated eggs. At last, the 
parting hour came. There was much kissing and handshaking 
as the train slowly pulled out toward Kiev. 

The next morning we arrived in Kiev, where the train 
stopped for about two hours. While there, I thought of 
Hetman Mazeppa, famous Ukrainian hero of the eighteenth 
century. We strolled through the town, which had been the 
capital of the Ukraine until the revolution. Now, Kiev is too 
much exposed to an attack from Poland, and the capital of 
the Ukraine is Kharkov. 

Kiev is very picturesque, indeed the most interesting town 
of southern Russia. It was taken by the Germans in the 
Great War as were Kharkov and Rostov-on-Don. Later, the 
Poles entered Kiev in the Polish-Russian war, but were driven 
out by the Russians, who pursued them almost to Warsaw. 
There the Russian offensive broke down and a general retreat 
followed. There were plenty of old trenches with barbed wire 
entanglements visible from the train in the pasture land. It 
will take many years before the forces of man and of nature 
will have obliterated the last traces of the war. 

This was our last day in Russia, and we took leave of the 


176 


GOOD-BY TO SOVIETLAND 


country with mingled emotions of sorrow and of joy. We 
were getting nearer home with every hour as we left a country 
that had offered much hospitality and friendship. Many 
pleasant recollections of Russia would surely live on in our 
memories, and we hoped that we might again see the Russian 
soil. Toward evening we reached Ozhenin, the Ukrainian 
frontier station. Thirty miles further on lay Shepetovka, where 
we should have to pass the Soviet Customs before we could 
cross the Polish-Russian border. 

We reached Shepetovka at 6 P. M. and had to spend two 
hours there. Our baggage was thoroughly examined by the 
G. P. U. non-commissioned officers. I had to unwrap every 
specimen of minerals, coals, and fossils. The N. C. O. accepted 
my wholesale designation of “coal samples” which covered 
everything. He kept the train waiting until I had re-wrapped 
and replaced everything in my trunk. He did not question 
my camera, but took away the field-glasses, because “it is not 
permitted to export field-glasses from Russia,” notwithstanding 
the fact that none are manufactured there. I should have had 
my field-glasses recorded in my passport. But I had never 
been told about such specific regulations. I was invited to 
sign an application to have my field-glasses sent to some address 
in Kharkov which I might choose. I did so and also sent 
instructions to Kharkov to have them forwarded to me through 
the foreign department of the Donugol.* When I signed 
this paper in the inner office of the customhouse, I saw 


*1 never heard of them again. 


177 



GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


somebody’s gold watch and chain and silver cigarette case on 
the table. Probably they had fallen victim to a law which 
does not permit the exportation of gold and silver from the 
U. S. S. R. In this case, the sufferer was a Russian. Except 
for the field-glasses, everything went well. At last we boarded 
the train. Just at the moment when the train pulled out, my 
two companions noticed the loss of their heavy overcoats. 
They had left them in the customhouse. 

I had seen one of the G. P. U. non-coms board the train 
and went to fetch him. He consented to join us in our 
compartment. We had good cognac and cigarettes, and Ivan 
Ivanovich became quite sociable. He telephoned to Shepetovka 
from a little station, and had the coats put in the office, and 
I wrote out a request to the customs officer to hand the coats 
to the Derutra and another order to the Derutra to send the 
coats to a certain address in Berlin. Both papers were made 
out in German. Ivan Ivanovich conversed in excellent German, 
which had a rather bookish flavor. I inquired where he had 
acquired it. “Oh, I was a prisoner of war in Germany and 
was taught German in Stettin,” was the answer. The Germans 
seem to have sent some of their prisoners to school, school 
teaching seeming to be one of the irrepressible impulses of 
the German race. 

Ivan Ivanovich stayed with us for about an hour, giving 
me a long German lecture on Communism. We parted in 
great friendship, which had been moistened with much cognac. 
He was a likable fellow, and I felt sure he would forward the 


178 


GOOD-BY TO SOVIETLAND 


coats. The overcoats arrived in due time in Berlin, and I 
wished that he had been in charge of my field-glasses. 

It was dark when the train reached the Polish frontier station, 
Spoldunove. We had to get out, have our baggage examined, 
and hand in our passports. It took a long time to get every¬ 
thing straightened out, and we took the opportunity to have 
a little supper. 

We had second class tickets and no sleeping accommoda¬ 
tions. I gave two Polish conductors an American paper dollar 
each and asked them to put us in a first-class compartment. 
They also got the difference in fare. So we were locked into 
the compartment where we could go to sleep peacefully, while 
the second class was filled to overflowing and two Polish army 
officers had to stand up all night in the corridor of the car 
for want of seats. 

At seven on Monday morning, September 12, we arrived 
in Warsaw. We took a stroll to the Hotel Bristol where I 
had to get the sleeping car tickets from the Societe Inter¬ 
nationale des Wagons Lits, which is the European equivalent 
of the Pullman Company in America. 

The office was not yet open when we arrived, and we 
accordingly went to the Cafe Bristol for breakfast. I had 
been warned not to speak German or Russian in Poland, but 
only French. So I addressed the head waiter in French. He 
replied in German and asked me to use that language. Every 
waiter in the cafe spoke German and none French. 

After having obtained the railroad and sleeper tickets for the 


179 


GOLDEN DAYS OF SOVIET RUSSIA 


evening train to Berlin, for which each of us paid 122 zloti 
($14.20, a zloti being about 11 cents), we had all day to see 
Warsaw. We strolled through this beautiful city, admired 
the fine stores, saw well-dressed men and women again after 
five months, and observed the glittering uniforms of the Polish 
officers and non-coms. 

I had the address of a very good restaurant —Pod Bacchusian, 
meaning “Under the Bacchus.” A German-speaking waiter 
was provided for us and we had a royal meal with excellent 
starka, the famous Polish brandy, and delicious food. We 
engaged a taxi for the entire afternoon. I walked along the 
line of taxi-drivers calling out in German, “Who of you fellows 
can talk German?” There was a lively reply, and I selected 
the most intelligent-looking of the lot. The first half-kilometer 
of the ride cost 50 groschen or 5^ cents American money, and 
each kilometer more, one zloti (11 cents). We ran up a bill of 
26 zloti for the afternoon and stopped again for a big dinner at 
“Pod Bacchusian.” The exquisite meal cost us less than three 
dollars apiece. 

When we went into the sleeping car, we found an English¬ 
man there with whom we passed a pleasant evening, although 
it was uncomfortable to sit up in the sleeping compartments 
after the beds were made. Sitting on the lower berth does 
not leave enough room to hold one’s head straight. 

During the night we passed the German border without 
having to leave the train, and Tuesday morning found us in 
Berlin, after breakfast on the train. 


180 


GOOD-BY TO SOVIETLAND 


I went with my companions to the Hotel Central, hoping 
not to be taken for an American. We had not shaved for 
two days, and our clothes were mussed. I spoke German at 
the hotel office and mentioned our having come from Kharkov. 
All to no avail. Top prices were charged for the room, which 
only two of us were to occupy for one night. It was, however, 
a most delightful room and bath. 

In the forenoon we went to the Russgertorg (the Russian- 
German Trading Corporation) to have my Russian draft 
honored. It was arranged that the Bank des Ostens would 
pay $3,000 in American bills. We got the money that 
afternoon, and in the evening one of our little party departed. 

The next morning I made the rounds of the steamer lines 
and got a berth on the Nieuwe Amsterdam , scheduled to sail 
September 21st. Fortunately one had been turned in a few 
minutes before by a traveler who had changed his plans. With 
the date for my return to America definitely fixed, I could 
pass the remaining time with pleasant visiting in Germany and 
Austria. And a week later, although aboard a slow steamer 
with a ten days’ ocean voyage in view, I was definitely 
headed for home. 


181 
















■ m 


























































* 













































































































































BERLIN • 

Germany 


WARSA' 


PRAGUE 


Poland 


VIENNA* 


♦ BUDAPEST, 


I5TAMDUL 















MOSCOW* 


OREL • 


Kursk 


KHARKOV, 















































